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Oracle VM VirtualBox pros and cons

Vendor: Oracle

4.1 out of 5

64 reviews
91% willing to recommend

3,686 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Oracle VM VirtualBox offers flexibility and performance with support for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. As an open-source software, it allows custom modifications. Key features include snapshots and a command-line interface. Compatibility extends to multiple OS. However, it faces issues like limited migration support, installation challenges, scalability limits, stability problems, and driver handling issues. Users report frequent crashes and compatibility concerns with ARM-based systems and Hyper-V subsystems, making it less ideal for server environments.

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Oracle VM VirtualBox offers exceptional flexibility, allowing multiple platforms like Windows, Linux, and Macintosh to run seamlessly.

The open-source nature enables users to modify the source code according to specific requirements.

It is highly versatile, offering command-line options for creating and managing virtual machines, which is superior to other desktop products.

The powerful snapshot feature provides an advantageous way to create test environments and safeguard against disasters.

Oracle VM VirtualBox supports multi-platform compatibility, working effortlessly across mainstream and commercial operating systems.

CONS

Oracle VM VirtualBox is not as robust as server platforms and lacks certain enterprise features like migration and high availability storage.

It requires improvement in business continuity planning, disaster recovery management, and centralized data storage.

The communication setup is slow, with connectivity issues affecting networking and data batching.

Oracle VMs lack scalability as they are primarily designed for desktops rather than servers.

The installation process is complex, and the platform experiences stability issues, often not working properly.

Oracle VM VirtualBox Pros review quotes

WS

Werner-Schonborn

Product Specialist at Schoemans Technologies

Oct 16, 2019

This product is extremely easy to install, use, has a great GUI and is incredibly stable.

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reviewer1447101

Director of Engineering at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Dec 16, 2020

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.

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EN

IT Manager at a non-tech company with 51-200 employees

Oct 28, 2019

This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments.

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Oracle VM VirtualBox

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reviewer1766661

IT Architect - AI at CGI

Jan 22, 2022

It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge.

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IS

Senior Principal Consultant at CCE

Nov 28, 2018

This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments.

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reviewer1197474

Head Of Information Technology at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 16, 2019

The most valuable feature is the ability to copy bidirectionally between the desktop and the virtual machine.

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IT Manager at TGR

May 11, 2022

It's very simple to use.

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SG

Satishbabu Gunukula, Oracle ACE

Sr. Tech Systems Architect at Intuitive

Jun 1, 2022

Oracle VM Virtualbox is easy to use and does not require much training.

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IT Manager at TGR

Jul 29, 2020

The solution is very convenient and easy to use.

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Kopano Ramaphoi

Consultant at SmartCloud

Jun 8, 2023

The product gives us the flexibility to try different machines.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 42)

Oracle VM VirtualBox Cons review quotes

WS

Werner-Schonborn

Product Specialist at Schoemans Technologies

Oct 16, 2019

It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network.

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reviewer1447101

Director of Engineering at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Dec 16, 2020

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.

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EN

IT Manager at a non-tech company with 51-200 employees

Oct 28, 2019

This should have better support for multiple network cards and some parts of the GUI should be improved.

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Oracle VM VirtualBox

Free Report: Oracle VM VirtualBox Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Oracle VM VirtualBox. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.

847,862 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1766661

IT Architect - AI at CGI

Jan 22, 2022

Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great.

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IS

Senior Principal Consultant at CCE

Nov 28, 2018

I think that this solution should be more user-friendly.

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reviewer1197474

Head Of Information Technology at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 16, 2019

It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically.

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IT Manager at TGR

May 11, 2022

Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement.

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SG

Satishbabu Gunukula, Oracle ACE

Sr. Tech Systems Architect at Intuitive

Jun 1, 2022

The user interface needs to be improved.

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IT Manager at TGR

Jul 29, 2020

The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine.

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Kopano Ramaphoi

Consultant at SmartCloud

Jun 8, 2023

Oracle’s support team should improve its response time.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 40)

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