We performed a comparison between Oracle VM and Oracle VM VirtualBox based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Oracle VM has a slight edge in the comparison. It is a mature, stable, and flexible solution. One area where Oracle VM VirtualBox did come out on top, however, was in the ease of deployment category.
"I like Oracle VM's vMotion and cloning features."
"It's a very mature product."
"In terms of server provisioning, it only takes a few clicks of a button and a bit of install automation."
"The most valuable features of Oracle VM are live migration and snapshots."
"The cloning is a great feature and live migration is very easy."
"If you want to access the VM from anywhere over the Internet, you put it in a public subnet. So, VMs are linked to that. The subnets are linked to it. So, it's perfectly secured if it's a private network. The security is set."
"I don't need to create a repository to allocate storage to my virtual machine, rather I can just use store locally."
"Its ease of management and simplicity are most valuable. It is free, and you can provision an unlimited number of VMs at no cost for clients. They also provide perfect support."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"Oracle VM VirtualBox has a platform where the support team responds to frequently asked questions by its users. Every time I have had issues with Oracle VM VirtualBox, I always get a solution from Oracle's online platform or GitHub."
"The flexibility as well as performance wise and as well as data volume, we have huge volume stored."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"The installation is easy."
"The configuration and installation is pretty straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"The automatic start of the product to work as a background process has shortcomings and needs improvement."
"This solution is not as stable as other solutions in the market. But, Oracle has made an effort to improve these issues with recent updates."
"Something that could be improved are the snapshots that go in the ZFS Storage. If you want to enjoy Oracle VM, you will definitely want it to go together with ZFS Storage to maximize on the snapshot facility."
"Oracle VM should be promoted more as an open-source and stable software."
"Oracle VM is not very stable. When you encounter any issue, it's unclear what is happening."
"One is the hypervisor. Right now, it’s all using Xen. What would be really helpful is to have some choice, and the underlying hypervisor technology use KVM which is very popular with certain workloads."
"Its database management features could be better."
"It was a complex setup. It was very difficult for me."
"The solution is not flexible."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow."
"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."
"The solution should work to simplify the system. However, it should be flexible enough to allow for special cases."
"The solution needs to improve its flexibility. It's not as flexible as VMware."
"This should have better support for multiple network cards and some parts of the GUI should be improved."
"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."
Oracle VM is ranked 7th in Server Virtualization Software with 78 reviews while Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 62 reviews. Oracle VM is rated 8.0, while Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Oracle VM writes "A cheap option available for Linux environments which is useful for many workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "The solution is versatile, simple to use, and stable". Oracle VM is most compared with VMware vSphere, KVM, Proxmox VE, Hyper-V and RHEV, whereas Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Proxmox VE, KVM, Hyper-V, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere. See our Oracle VM vs. Oracle VM VirtualBox report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
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