We performed a comparison between KVM 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: Both KVM and Oracle VM VirtualBox have their strengths and weaknesses. Oracle VM VirtualBox seems to be the more favorable choice of the two, since it offers good scalability whereas scalability seems to be an ongoing issue for KVM users.
"KVM is stable."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"The most valuable feature of KVM is its stability."
"Documentation and problem-solving troubleshooting are the most valuable features. Performance (when fine-tuned and with "special" HW) is awesome, equal to or more than other enterprise closed-source solutions."
"I find the density of the product most valuable. It is density that a technologist can just assign page merging. This is what makes KVM one of the important players of the virtualization market."
"This solution is open source and easy to configure."
"The product's scalability is good...It's a very stable product."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"Oracle VM Virtualbox is easy to use and does not require much training."
"It is a stable product."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"The scalability of the solution is very good."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"We still occasionally build Interlaced Wireless Protection within our environment. The ecosystem entails areas, where we support agents, and release backup and security solutions. Collaboration with independent software vendors (ITOLs or ITOLED) is necessary to offer these solutions to customers. However, the scope of the ecosystem in KVM is not as extensive as that of VMware's. In contrast, VMware boasts a robust partner network, allowing for comprehensive customer solutions. On the other hand, KVM’s ecosystem is comparatively limited in comparison. I would like to see FT features in KVM."
"The initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and made more user-friendly."
"In our setup, we do not have any dashboards or orchestration, and it is hard to manage. We have 25 gig network cards, but the software driver we have only supported 10 gigs."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"Monitoring and resolution could be improved."
"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."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"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."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"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."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews while Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 reviews. KVM is rated 8.0, while Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "The solution is versatile, simple to use, and stable". KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation and Oracle VM, whereas Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere. See our KVM vs. Oracle VM VirtualBox report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
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