Oracle VM VirtualBox Pros and Cons

This product is extremely easy to install, use, has a great GUI and is incredibly stable.

The good thing is that it is multi-platform. Once you create a virtual machine in one particular environment, you can switch over to see if you can run it in other environments. For example, if you are on Windows and you create this virtual machine, you can actually go ahead and change the operating system. You can switch it over to Linux or Mac OS and see if you can run the VirtualBox on those particular machines. It even runs on some of the commercial operating systems that are not mainstream, such as Solaris and BSD. These kinds of operating systems are also supported by VirtualBox. The other thing that is good about VirtualBox is that it is open source. So, if you need to do any modifications for your own purposes, you can just download the source, modify it, and deploy it in your environment. It is pretty good and very versatile. You can create and manipulate virtual machines from the command line, which is also very important. It's something that some other products on the desktop side do not have. VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop don't have a good command-line interface to create and manipulate virtual machines, whereas VirtualBox has it out of the box, which is pretty good.

This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments.

The most valuable feature is the ability to copy bidirectionally between the desktop and the virtual machine.

The solution is very convenient and easy to use.

It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring.

The most valuable aspects of the solution were the support and performance of the product and the flexibility it gives you to work.

The solution's most valuable feature is its stability.

I think VirtualBox has good stability because I use it in an environment with several resolutions.

The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable.

It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network.

It has some issues when you have some weird device drivers. For instance, when you have a weird sound driver working on your machine, and the VirtualBox needs to output the sound of the virtual machine into the sound driver of the physical machine, the bare metal, it doesn't work too well. If you tweak lots of drivers and play around with the different kinds of drivers and machines, you will probably break something. I have not played with it too much and maybe it already supports it, but it would probably be good to have the ability to use a container from the virtual machine environment instead of spinning off a complete virtual machine. There are other tools for that. On Linux, you have a DXE, LXC framework, and you have Docker as well. Docker is good because it is multi-platform, and you can run Docker on pretty much anything, even different processors, but it would be good if we had a VirtualBox running on it while spinning off containers instead of full virtual machines. The other thing that will become important, and I'm pretty sure that they are thinking about it as well is that there's this new hardware platform that Apple is releasing, which is an ARM-based new chip. So, VirtualBox will probably have to work on ARM-based CPUs as well.

This should have better support for multiple network cards and some parts of the GUI should be improved.

It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically.

The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine.

The memory and hardware usage could be a little bit lighter. Right now, it's quite heavy on the usage. The CPU usage should be lower.

The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities.

Oracle needs to improve its hot virtual machine migration. It didn't work as intended. It should allow us to migrate between virtual machines, without stopping the database.

The technical support needs to improve.

It would be good if we could use Hyper-V Windows subsystems with Linux and VirtualBox on the same instance. Currently, to be able to use VirtualBox, we have to restart the machine into an instance of Windows where Hyper-V is disabled, which is understandably very inconvenient.