Oracle VM VirtualBox Reviews

I primarily use the solution for testing purposes. Oracle VM VirtualBox is used majorly for creating virtual machine servers, Windows servers, specifically for Windows 10 or 11 clients. The solution is further used to configure multi-directories and implement the testing process. 

The solution is highly user-friendly and compatible with almost any operating system. The tool is also free to use as it's an open-source solution. 

The interface options of the solution should be more user-friendly and easy to comprehend. For instance, when I am using the solution on full screen mode, sometimes I am unable to identify how to exit the present screen. 

Oracle VM VirtualBox should have a community to ask certain technical queries. 

I have been using the solution for five years. 

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a highly stable solution. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

I expect great scalability from the solution. 

I would rate the initial setup a nine out of ten. The solution can be very easily deployed. It takes just a few minutes to install Oracle VM VirtualBox. 

The solution is available for free use. 

At our company, we use the solution in the production environment. I would advise others to try it because it is great for beginners, doesn't require any technical knowledge, and can be easily learned. I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I use Oracle VM VirtualBox to provide my clients with performance, security, and scalability enhancements.

I like that Oracle VM is safe and stable. It is also very easy to administer. For example, opening a VM or adding a host adapter is extremely easy.

The most attractive feature in Oracle VM is that it's free except for the extension pack.

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.

I've been using this solution for almost four years.

It's a stable solution, and I would rate stability at ten out of ten.

Oracle VM VirtualBox's scalability is good, but resizing of storage can be a bit challenging sometimes. I would give scalability a rating of eight out of ten.

I focus mostly on SMEs, particularly those who run their enterprise solutions on cloud-based services.

The initial deployment is quick and takes about 10 minutes.

I deploy it and maintain it myself, along with the help of an administrator.

Price wise, Oracle VM VirtualBox is a six on a scale from one to ten.

I would definitely recommend Oracle VM VirtualBox. It can work from your laptop, and even a a loop configuration laptop is more than sufficient for testing. Another advantage is that it has teleporting, and you can also directly port your virtual machine configuration into Oracle cloud.

Overall, I would rate Oracle VM VirtualBox at eight out of ten.

We use this solution to quickly set up and test our new software releases on different operating system versions.

We used this for onboarding applications running on smaller equipment, as we noticed that it uses less resouces compared to other hypervisor systems.

This helped our passengers to get better services while travelling, such as entertainment, movies, games, details about the trip, et cetera.

The images used can easily be shipped with the onboard hardware.

We can also port or convert other types of images too.

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

It uses less resouces, which is a requirement as it is used on onboard hardware with very litle resources available.

Our development using new operating system releases can quickly be made. In some cases, we can set up the client's environment and perform local investigations to give competitve and qualyfied results for the customers to help reinforce our general reputation.

We keep our build and package down, and only start them when performing nightly builds.

It is easy to set up and makes it easy to protect VM guests running on the systems by IBM Spectrum Protect.

We use SPFS to mount the Spectrum Protect storage as a local filesystem and store our VM backups on that drive-letter or filesystem which sends data to the IBM Spectrum Protect storage.

The backup retentions are centrally managed from the IBM Spectrum Protect backup server.

We can browse and decide which of the backups to restore directly from the Virtualbox system.

This makes data protection very easy to use without special knowledge from agents.

We are using the free version of Virtualbox, so we have not tested the commercial solution.

That said, having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great.

The ability to emulate other types of CPU and hardware, such as PowerPC in both Little Endian and Big Endian, ARM CPU, s390x CPU architectures, and possibly older CPUs such as Motorola would be helpful. This would make the development of new software releases faster and easier.

In general, it is a good and stable product to use. We love it!  

I've used the solution for several years.

We've found the stability to be good.

The scalability is good.

We have never had a need to use technical support so far. 

Neutral

We previously used VMware and Proxmox KVM.

In terms of the initial setup, it's pretty easy to implement. 

We handled the initial setup in-house.

The ROI we've witnessed so far has been good.

We use the free solution; so we can't comment on the pricing at the moment.

We did also look at Proxmox KVM.

For simplicity, I'd advise users to use a backup method that is easy to use and to adapt to hypervisor solutions.

We use SPFS as it helps our clients to backup and restore in the way they understand.

My personal one is to create virtual machines to do different things within the house. I have a few servers in the house, and the servers themselves run lots of the services that we need, but sometimes you need to have a service that is run on a kind of a "dedicated machine." So, instead of having a physical machine to run those services, we just create a virtual one. It just spins off like a virtual machine, and everything works okay. Some of the machines that are for more home automation and other such things don't need very powerful processes or much memory. They are very suitable to be run on virtual machines. They can have their own IP addresses and can be reached from the outside of the home.

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.

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.

I have been using this solution for a long time. It was a standalone product before it became an Oracle product.

For my users, it is very stable. We do home automation on it, and it works really well. It has some advanced features like auto restart of the virtual machine. If your virtual machine crashes, or even when you have a power outage and the server comes back up on its own, it spins off the virtual machines automatically. You don't have to do anything about it. It is pretty good.

I don't have any impressions on the scalability because I only use it at home, and one of the machines that we have is not so powerful. The other one is a little powerful. So, we can run lots of virtual machines, but we don't run that many.

I needed support just once. It was mostly because I decided to do something that I should not have done. One of the machines that we have is a little older, so I decided to use a method to install a newer version of the operating system, which theoretically is not supported on the machine. There are lots of articles on the web where you can patch this and that to make it work. So, I did it, and unfortunately, it broke VirtualBox. I did not reach directly to customer support, but I posted a question in the community, and we agreed that what I did wasn't a good idea.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, and anyone can do it as long as you know how to install a particular operating system. You just download the executables from the website and run them. They install VirtualBox, and then you just open it up and point it to the disk where you have your operating system, and it does it really fast.

It is pretty good for the price, which is free.

I would rate VirtualBox a nine out of ten. It is really good, and I like it very much. It is definitely not a ten because even though it has lots of support from Oracle itself, it is an open-source product. If you look at the user interface, it is very decent, but it is not the most polished user interface. 

I have mounted it with GlusterFS and I use it along with three on-prem physical nodes with Arch Linux's operating system and 12 VLANs to support around 50 VMs in different environments (TESTS, DEMOS, PRODUCTION).

The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are the most valuable features.

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.

I have been using the Oracle VM VirtualBox since it was owned by Innotek - the original creator of VirtualBox, version 1.5.4, in February 2008.

The stability of the solution has improved over time. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

The solution is scalable but you have to put in a lot of effort to reach the goal. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten. 

There is no technical support from Oracle but there is a community that provides good support. I rate the support a ten out of ten. 

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate the setup a ten out of ten. 

We use the free version. 

I recommend that people look beyond the popular comment of the bit twelve box that it is only for deployments or to test at fault. It's a very powerful tool that needs to be configured properly. 

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

I use it because my desktop is on Linux, and sometimes I need to open Microsoft Office or some VPN, which cannot use Linux. I start my VM Windows just to connect to some VPNs or to launch Microsoft Office.

Improvement-wise, the product needs to be made scalable.

I have experience with Oracle VM VirtualBox. Also, I am using the solution's latest version.

It is a stable product.

The product lacks scalability since it is for desktops and not for servers. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a three out of ten.

I have not contacted technical support.

The initial setup was easy.

It is an open-source solution.

It's a good product. I often use the product, and there is no problem. So, I would recommend the product to others planning to use it.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My main purpose in using this solution is to run Windows machines on top of my Linux servers. I am running a Windows server on top of a Linux machine and then another four machines just to create an environment for our clients so that people can log in. Because they don't find Linux easy to use, I give them windows on top which they find more familiar.

The thing is I like is the simplicity in Linux when I'm using the Oracle VirtualBox. In terms of networking, it doesn't need any special configuration, especially when working with Linux. The other thing I like about it is being able to share folders. It makes life very easy to transfer things from one person to another. I don't have to worry about mounting a USB device. You just create a folder and give privileges then I can share information very fast.

The product needs better support for multiple network cards. That is the major area that sometimes it can be a bit of a mess to configure multiple network cards to communicate well with each other. That's the major thing for me.

Another thing I've run into is that it would be nice on Oracle if you can use something like a Hyper-V environment. You can just install the environment and then start installing all your virtual machines on top of that. Rather than having to install Windows or Linux when you need them, you just install the VirtualBox. If it can just roll out on its own and had its own hyper vista software — that would be something I've been praying to see from Oracle VirtualBox.

I think also that a challenge I've seen some people have after I convince them to use the product is when they are switching to various views. In some situations, the view switches to a seamless full screen and the menu bar disappears. When this happens they may not know how to switch it back. I don't know if Oracle can put a button on-screen so that when you are in a seamless view or scale view or something like that so those familiar things still fit where you can find them. In fullscreen, you still have the menu, but in some of these screen views that don't have the menu, they could put a visible button that can bring the menu back up. With that, you can easily get back familiar controls and eject your USB or whatever you need to do. If you don't know the shortcuts, it can be difficult to navigate or do even common tasks. They need something else instead of just using keyboard shortcuts.

Oracle with VirtualBox rarely crashes since about version four onwards. It rarely crashes and rarely hangs. Although — I think it is on version six — sometimes I may take a snapshot and try to revert or even when I try to save a snapshot using Windows XP, sometimes the whole virtual machine crashes. But I am not sure if it is a fault with the software or something else because it only happens with one particular machine.

When you take three or four snapshots and you accumulate snapshots, it is as if at some point the snapshots get a bit mixed up in the machine, especially if you do not shut down. I have been helping some of my friends because they're not ready to move from XP. So I've gotten them to use Oracle VirtualBox for some solutions. One guy's machine crashed because they had been taking snapshot after snapshot. When we tried to restore it, we could not restore the machine back. So it happens, but rarely. But all in all, from Windows 7 downwards, I have not seen any problems with the VirtualBox. I actually love it. It's really stable for me.

I noticed also that if you do not shut it down regularly and you are constantly hibernating or pausing, that can be a really big headache. Sometimes the computer may freeze and you have to go back to the machine's original state.

So far my needs have been really static. I've not really tried to invest in scalability because my needs are fixed currently, so I do not have too much to say about scalability. But it should not be an issue.

The installation of VirtualBox itself is easy.

All of the implementations I have I did myself.

Right now I am mainly using the free versions of the solutions. I'm not ready to spend a lot because I don't have too many machines. I do not qualify to be charged yet. So I've never worried too much about the pricing because most of my pricing is academic for the machines at school. But even being a school, I have a special agreement with Microsoft.

On a scale of one to ten where ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine.

I recommend it, especially for people who are beginners because most things they will want to use will virtually be plug-and-play. It's click-and-use. I would recommend it to those people who are beginners. Because most other products, you really need to know a lot of networking and how to use them to maintain them. But with Oracle, it is simple. For most needs where you have to only have a really small network, this will be fine.

Having the flexibility to have VirtualBox run on a local machine, or over on the cloud.

The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh.

One of the things that we need, because with LeVAULT we control the authentication layer, and we support multiple factors for authentication -  anywhere from four to 27 factors  - and we allow you to be able to raise your key's devices, as keys to authenticate, as one of the factors. We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox.

We didn't talk about the capability of improving playing video, and being able to download; and streaming.

I haven't scaled it to that level, but we're about to do that. I will have a client that is going to virtualize 5000 to 10,000 virtual machines initially. Towards the next year we'll take it up to about 200,000 to 250,000. We'll soon find out what we'll need to implement it.

We have a few issues so far, there's a few things that we're going to do to improve the speed, like when you play videos and things like that. Overall it's pretty good.

We had other costumers that had used other solutions, such as VMware and Microsoft hypervisor, but I've pushed them all over to VirtualBox because of its flexibility and potential. 

It's pretty straightforward. You know I've used VirtualBox for over five or six years. It's pretty clear, enough to be able to follow through and install.

The most important factor when selecting a vendor is probably the ability to have partnerships, to be able to work. Because any technology that we have, it works with Oracle's platforms. So it's important for us to be able to work with partnerships, and that's the reason we became an Oracle Gold Partner.