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Hyper-V vs Oracle VM VirtualBox vs VMware Workstation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

Server Virtualization Software
Server Virtualization Software
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

Ananth Narayana Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective and good for small workloads while addressing update-driven challenges is needed
I use Azure Monitor and other monitoring solutions to support clients in Accenture's managed services. We support multiple environments, primarily on cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, and also on-premises environments with operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Solaris, among others…
Kopano  Ramaphoi - PeerSpot reviewer
A flexible and easy-to-deploy product that provides a great user experience
The product should improve its scalability. It should be more flexible to be used with desktops with different capacities. We do not have much storage on our desktops, and we must allocate a certain amount of memory to install the product. When we install a virtual machine, we have a limit that we cannot exceed 80% of RAM.
Shambhu Narayan  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-manage solution that has really good customer support compared to other market players
VMware Workstation makes it easy to manage all the resources that we are handling. VMware Workstation has reduced our infrastructure cost. If someone wants machines, I can create them easily using the solution. VMware Workstation is easier to manage than other workstations like Oracle Workstation. VMware Workstation is an easy-to-manage solution, and its support is really good compared to other market players. Overall, I rate VMware Workstation an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The restore function of the virtual server is valuable to me."
"We've probably seen a 50 percent speed increase on our SQL server. Hyper-V has also significantly reduced our downtimes with faster boot-up and reboot. If we have to reboot a server, there is maybe two or three minutes of downtime. When we were on a bare-metal server, it could be five to ten minutes due to the total boot time."
"The tool is very easy to implement, so we can manage it in our company."
"It's a stable product."
"The installation was straightforward."
"It's good for what it does. If you have a small or medium-scale acclimatization, it's an excellent solution."
"It is actually very low on resources. It doesn't use many resources. It is also very easy to tailor. You can change things like the amount of memory and storage on the fly. It is very stable and reliable. I like its replication feature, which is very good. It is also very easy to move the virtual machines across push servers without any difficulty. Its performance is also very good. Now with this pandemic, a lot of workers are working from home. A lot of workers have been using laptops as their desktop computers, and they would remote into a virtual PC. There is no difficulty, and they can't tell the difference between this and the real one. It is much easier to manage."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to copy bidirectionally between the desktop and the virtual machine."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"I think VirtualBox has good stability because I use it in an environment with several resolutions."
"I like that it has a snapshot feature."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"This product is very user-friendly and easy to use."
"This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments."
"Compatible with almost any operating system"
"The product works well."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the speed of access and quality of upgrade. Those are the more important and pertinent aspects as far as we were concerned. Functionality and features were relevant for the customers. What a customer chose, we had to make sure that it operated."
"The initial setup is simple and takes only five minutes to complete."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Player is the ability to snapshot with or without memory."
"The most valuable feature of the VMware Workstation is the ease to create a development environment. When you have different ongoing developments, you often need to create a lot of different development environments. With this workstation solution, you can have a development environment for all the things you develop."
"VMware Workstation allows you to run a virtual machine."
"I appreciate the ease of backup and snapshot creation. The ability to revert to previous versions without losing data is very useful for our team."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is snapshot."
 

Cons

"Hyper-V is hosted on OS but if your OS scratches you are in big trouble. In addition, if a host fails, automatically the machine and the virtual machine should boot from another source. Those type of features would benefit Hyper-V."
"The security part of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"There's room for improvement in Hyper-V. One area I've personally encountered issues with is live migration. Sometimes during live migrations, the process gets stuck in a certain state. This can happen with replication as well. It's not necessarily a major problem, but at times, the error messages aren't very informative. They don't clearly explain why the migration failed."
"ometimes a server or machine shuts down and doesn't automatically restart."
"There is a hard limitation of 20 gigs per file with Dropbox, so you've got to overcome that by chunking the zip files into something smaller and manageable."
"The product can be a bit difficult to use."
"The weakness of Hyper-V is in its interaction with iSCSI protocols."
"There is a hard limitation of 20 gigs per file with Dropbox, so you've got to overcome that by chunking the zip files into something smaller and manageable."
"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."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities."
"The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine."
"It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
"The product lacks scalability since it is for desktops and not for servers."
"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."
"For some virtual machine configurations, you have to go to the text editor and make the configuration changes, which could be improved."
"I need to buy a newer version of the tool to support Windows Server."
"They could bring in many different features from VMware vSphere to Workstation."
"The price of VMware Workstation could improve."
"The tool can improve network storage technology."
"The product is outdated."
"VMware Player should provide a cloud version with no limitations to hardware resources."
"My experience with Workstation is limited, so I don't know all the functionalities of this tool. Maybe Workstation could add some more compatibility with other vendors."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is cheap."
"The pricing isn't too bad, because you can do the bare metal hypervisor, and it is pretty fair. Other competitors are more expensive."
"The pricing is not an issue for us because we have a licensing agreement with Microsoft. So we are given an 80% discount."
"Hyper-V's price is essentially zero because it's a feature of the operating system that I can enable and disable at will."
"I do not have experience with the pricing or the licensing of the product."
"The pricing is not much. We have a very big environment, and pricing is no problem."
"The Hyper-V pricing and licensing are very good."
"Hyper-V is cost-effective and is a one-time purchase. Microsoft has multiple licensing options available, such as a subscription model and an outside purchase model that customers can choose as per their requirements."
"Price wise, Oracle VM VirtualBox is a six on a scale from one to ten."
"The solution is free."
"Everything is free within limitations. Once you go over a certain level of usage you have to license the product."
"It is a very cost-effective solution."
"The tool is not as expensive as other products."
"The product is free to use."
"It is pretty good for the price, which is free."
"No licensing is required as it is open-source."
"The pricing is a bit steep in my opinion for testing and there are other options."
"The licensing costs are cheap. I pay approximately $100 per year."
"Licensing costs are paid on a yearly basis."
"The product has a moderate price."
"With a VDI solution, there is always extra cost running a VDI solution but it's not for cost purposes anymore. In the beginning, it was to save money on hardware but at the moment it's other aspects that are more important why you should use a VDI solution."
"With all its support and ease of use, VMware Player's pricing is fair."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution is moderately priced. I rate the pricing a six out of ten."
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Comparison Review

it_user234735 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 10, 2015
Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5
I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
35%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does KVM compare with Hyper-V?
KVM is better. But let's just look at the software instead of judging. Hyper-V was a free solution from Microsoft to ...
How does Proxmox VE compare with Hyper-V?
One of the best things about Proxmox VE is that it is open-source and very inexpensive. You get all of the same featu...
What do you like most about Hyper-V?
The initial setup is not difficult at all. It is very easy.
How does KVM compare to Oracle VM VirtualBox?
KVM is easy to use, stable and flexible. It is mature and very fast. It is an affordable open-source solution that is...
What do you like most about Oracle VM VirtualBox?
The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle VM VirtualBox?
The pricing is flexible. When Oracle bought VirtualBox, they introduced some licensing issues. However, it did not af...
Which VMware solution would you go with - Workstation or vSphere?
VM Workstation’s setup is so easy, you can use it almost instantly, it works well with Windows and Linux. We like VM ...
What do you like most about VMware Workstation?
The product is stable, very easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to configure, and easy to set up.
What needs improvement with VMware Workstation?
The product's integration capabilities are an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Large customer base from all industries, all over the world. Two major Hyper-V customers are Telefonica and EmpireCLS.
Airbus, Colorado State University, SCS Africa, Wolf Medical Systems.
Akademiska Hus
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