We performed a comparison between Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE had a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. However, in terms of features, Oracle VM VirtualBox users felt the solution was unstable, whereas Proxmox VE users felt some bugs needed fixing.
"The most valuable feature is the ability to copy bidirectionally between the desktop and the virtual machine."
"This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments."
"Oracle VM Virtualbox is easy to use and does not require much training."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"The product gives us the flexibility to try different machines."
"It's very simple to use."
"The cloning is a very useful tool."
"That the product is free and still has all the features you expect is a huge benefit."
"The solution's maintenance part was very easy."
"The solution is easy to install. It can run on a lot of different types of hardware. Creating virtual machines with it is really easy."
"The solution has good high availability."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is performance."
"Its compatibility is most valuable."
"The solution's most valuable feature is backups."
"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."
"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 is not flexible."
"The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine."
"Oracle VMs don't have a solid web interface of their own. This is an area where Oracle is lagging behind. Now, we use headless servers, install Oracle VMs, and manage them remotely. We could use phpVirtual Box, but it is a third-party solution. A lot of people contribute to it, and it's not authenticated by Oracle. As a result, I don't find it to be a good option. Therefore, I would like to see Oracle offer an extension pack or a licensed version that fixes this problem."
"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."
"Since I face issues importing Windows OVA inside Proxmox VE, a clickable button should be added to select the OVA format and import it inside Proxmox VE."
"It's one of those things for me to move things on to the cloud. It's not so easy. I am always on the laptop and have to monitor that because if you want to make strides; you need to stay online."
"Lacking in enterprise features."
"It is a good solution, but it is very complicated in some ways. It is not easy. You must have experience in the console mode to do some configurations. A lot of documentation and YouTube videos are available that you can use to learn about it."
"Proxmox VE can improve the management of virtual discs. For example, if my virtual disc is 200 GB and I want to decrease it is not easy. I have to do a lot of things to decrease the size of existing virtual machines. If the Proxmox VE team can make it easy for customers to instantly increase or decrease the virtual machine hard disc, it will be very helpful for me. However, the containers I can do it easily."
"The only disadvantage of Proxmox VE is that it is a young solution so it does have some bugs."
"The only issue I have with Proxmox VE is updating it. You have to manually update it or you have to have a way to update it automatically."
"The management can be better. It's not like VMware where you can get all clusters on a single dashboard. In VMware, you can literally see all the VMs running in one cluster regardless of the host."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 reviews while Proxmox VE is ranked 1st in Server Virtualization Software with 58 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2, while Proxmox VE is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "The solution is versatile, simple to use, and stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Proxmox VE writes "Easy to use and supports multi-monitors on multiple VMs in KVM". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with KVM, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere, whereas Proxmox VE is most compared with VMware vSphere, KVM, Nutanix AHV Virtualization, Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor. See our Oracle VM VirtualBox vs. Proxmox VE report.
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Proxmox VE is a very fast and powerful solution. It offers feature-rich virtualization, has open-standards compliance, and also includes redundancy and failover capabilities. What I like about Proxmox VE is that it lets you rack and stack two or more nodes and enables you to be up and running with a one-node failure tolerance in very little time. Proxmox VE’s integration with ZFS is also fantastic. It allows you to create pools to store your VM images and data on very easily and their great web UI makes it easy to check drive health, ZFS scrub status, and other things. I think the best part of the web UI is that everything is configurable from the web user interface without having to use the command line. It also has graphs and additional visualizations so you can evaluate the performance of everything. Beyond that, even though you can use Proxmox VE on a single server, the solution makes it easy to set up a high availability cluster on multiple hosts if needed.
Regarding Oracle VM VirtualBox, I would say its most valuable features are its virtualization, its compatibility with older OSes, and its testing of environments without causing interruptions or any harm to production. Besides making it possible to run multiple VMs on a laptop or desktop, its ease of deployment makes the solution appealing. Not only is it easy to set up, but the software is free. Moreover, it has a nice interface. However, I think Oracle VM VirtualBox could use some improvements on its reporting as well as on its network settings for VMs, which can sometimes be hard for the average user to find and understand.
Conclusion: While Oracle is a safe and excellent option when it comes to virtualizing an operating system, I would suggest Proxmox VE because it is newer, has a lot of powerful features, and is a very reliable and stable solution.