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KVM vs Oracle VM VirtualBox vs VMware Workstation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Mindshare comparison

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

Featured Reviews

Lan Tuong - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful to manage the virtual environments
The most valuable features of KVM for us are the console, which allows us to build or clone VMs quickly, and the ability to take snapshots and recreate new VMs rapidly. That's one of the things we love about KVM. The built-in management console, Auto KVM, is the most valuable tool for managing our virtual environments. We use it most to create and fire up new VMs or clone them for customers based on requests. The migration tools have worked quite well for us. We're moving from an Oracle Solaris platform for KVM logical domains, upgrading, and using KVM from Red Hat. It's slightly different but very similar to Oracle Unbreakable Linux, which is basically a clone of Red Hat. Oracle's console is easier to use than Red Hat's, though.
Tomasz Pietas - PeerSpot reviewer
Good functionality and free to use with a useful snapshot feature
The functionality and productivity are very good. I can test and roll back features in my work. It's a big platform. It's very useful. I like that it has a snapshot feature. The virtual network is great. There are a lot of features. It has everything I need. The product is free to use. It's easy to set up.
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 scalability part should be better."
"The GUI interface makes the management of KVM easier than ever before."
"I like that it's easy to manage. It's also more powerful when it comes to security than others. That point of view is the one consideration. The other consideration is that it's cost-effective."
"The initial setup was simple."
"KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"I think nine out of the ten supercomputers in the world use Linux KVM, so I think that attests to the fact that it is a scalable product."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"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."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"The solution is very 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."
"I like that it is free and runs on Linux/Ubuntu - I wouldn't use any other solution. I am able to perform small developing tests."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its stability."
"I like that it's easy to use. It's easy to deploy virtual machines. You have to insert your ISO and the image of your OS and configure it. They provide a step-by-step guide, and you have to follow it. In the end, you have to start the machine, and that's all you have to do. I liked that they synchronized the mouse, keyboard, and everything. When you finish the installation, it directly links to your laptop. This makes copying and pasting things from my laptop inside the virtual machine easy."
"Because the setup is so easy, this is a solution that can be used at a moment's notice."
"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."
"The tool’s GUI is very user-friendly."
"VMware Player's best feature is the ability to run different OS's simultaneously."
"VMware Workstation has tons of third-party support, the largest partner ecosystem. VMware works with a ton of different vendors. They have plugins for almost everything. Other hypervisors lack the flexibility that VMware Workstation offers."
"Great at solving connection problems."
"The most valuable features of the VMware Workstation solutions are the ESXi and vCenter."
 

Cons

"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"One thing that maybe could be improved is making it easier to scale. It needs to be more clear on how to scale the storage space for virtual machines."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"I have previously used VMware and KVM is easier to use. However, they both have their strengths depending on their use cases. They are mostly equal. One of VMware's advantages is it has better support."
"Some things are pretty basic, and they could be more robust with more detail."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"Technical support could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an improved user interface and dashboard. This type of improvement will make it easy or help our engineers understand the solution from a requirement point of view."
"The solution should have more enterprise features, like migration, high availability storage, disaster recovery, and the ability to deploy to enterprise-scale usage. They should not just offer desktop usage."
"The solution should work to simplify the system. However, it should be flexible enough to allow for special cases."
"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."
"One valuable feature would be for it to work right the first time but it doesn't necessarily do that."
"The solution lacks some open source remote administration tools. The reload of individual virtual machine definitions through the vboxweb service (via its API) without restarting it and the access to shared storage (to use teleport functions) need to be improved."
"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."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
"The GUI interface could be improved."
"Lacks the ability to clone onto another system rather than starting from scratch."
"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."
"VMware Workstation could improve the export and import of virtual machines."
"The support can be improved."
"The product’s virtual machine data backup feature needs upgrading."
"One improvement is mouse emulation. Some people in the office want to use a five—or seven-button mouse like they're used to at home, but they can't with the workstation setup."
"The product's integration capabilities are an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no cost involved in the use of KVM, as it is open source."
"I use KVM for free through Proxmox, which offers a free license alternative."
"KVM is priced reasonably."
"​It is free and can be run from your laptop, if needed, unlike VMware.​"
"The solution is extremely cheap in China."
"It is cheaper than other solutions out there on the market."
"I use the free version of KVM, and I'm not sure if there is a paid version."
"We had some problems with the licensing."
"The product is free to use."
"This is an open-source product and it can be used free of charge."
"Price wise, Oracle VM VirtualBox is a six on a scale from one to ten."
"Pricing does not apply for us, we do not have to pay for the service."
"The tool is not as expensive as other products."
"The license I use is free."
"No licensing is required as it is open-source."
"Oracle should consider reducing the cost of the product."
"The pricing is a bit steep in my opinion for testing and there are other options."
"The solution’s pricing is moderate."
"The product has a moderate price."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"The licensing costs are cheap. I pay approximately $100 per year."
"I use the free version of VMware Workstation."
"The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you."
"It has the best licensing modules."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Why KVM??? Help please!
KVM scales better, orchestration better, performs better and supports a wider range of hardware and, also, you can im...
Why KVM??? Help please!
Small support team, small cluster, low core count, use VMware products Large support team, large clusters with many c...
Why KVM??? Help please!
Far from being an expert, my opinion is that the positive sides of KVM are: Lower costs and open-source which gives ...
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.
 

Comparisons

 

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Sample Customers

MediaWiki, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikidata, Wikiversity, Commons
Airbus, Colorado State University, SCS Africa, Wolf Medical Systems.
Akademiska Hus
Find out what your peers are saying about Proxmox, VMware, Microsoft and others in Server Virtualization Software. Updated: November 2024.
817,560 professionals have used our research since 2012.