Oracle VM VirtualBox Reviews

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 Oracle Virtualbox to create different virtual operating systems, including Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Windows, and Metasploit.

I like that Oracle VM VirtualBox has snapshots with which I can always go back to when my OS was functioning properly, and then I easily clone an OS without having to install it all from scratch.

Oracle VM VirtualBox doesn't work properly with an antivirus tool. I think Oracle has to come up with something that makes VM VirtualBox compatible with different antivirus applications. Though you can get Oracle VM VirtualBox running properly even without an antivirus tool, it keeps you vulnerable.

I have experience with Oracle VM VirtualBox.

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. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with KVM. I have used KVM since my company did software testing for four months. I also use other virtualization services.

I rate the overall product 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.

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 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.

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.

We use VirtualBox for running our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and a host of websites. The underlying operating system is Solaris, which we run on VirtualBox virtualized, and it is running exceptionally well. Then I run VirtualBox as a hypervisor and use Windows (when necessary) and Linux. I run a whole host of websites on Linux virtualized using VirtualBox and we also run our ERP — Xpert ERP — on VirtualBox.

It has contributed to the flexibility that we have running our network.

The most valuable feature for me is the ease-of-use. With the GUI, it is easy to set up things and configure new things intuitively. It is a very good interface. VirtualBox is not as feature-rich as VMware, but the GUI from VirtualBox more than makes up for the features that it is lacking.

We are currently on version 5.1.38 but we are definitely going to upgrade to version 6. Some of what I would like to see in the future may already be in that release.

For me, it would be great to have a function where I can teleport from one machine to another machine just using the GUI. At the moment, this capability is only available via the command line. Other products like VMware and Windows Hypervisor already have that functionality. I think it would be an excellent addition and improve the product if Oracle implemented this functionality directly in the GUI. 

The feature I would like in addition to teleporting is that I would like to see more reporting capabilities. For example, it would be good to be able to easily report on the status of the servers and virtual machines. It would be enough just to get a list that says how much CPU power each machine is using, the amount of memory it occupies, etcetera. Something like a snapshot of everything in graphical format. A dashboard that actually combines all the reporting about what is happening on your virtualization would be valuable. Getting all the information at a glance is what I would like to see.

I find the solution to be exceptionally stable. I've no reason to look for other solutions, honestly, because it is so stable. It just fits into your network and it just runs. No matter what you are doing, even if you do it wrong, nothing fails. The worst that can happen is that you allocate more resources than you actually have on the hardware platform. If you misallocate your resources and require more memory for your virtual sessions than is physically available on the platform, then you run into a little trouble. It doesn't fail, it just becomes a bit slow. Or it could get very slow, I guess, if you are careless. But it has never failed for me.

We live in an exceptionally small country. We have probably the lowest number of people per square kilometer in the world. There is only a group of about 20 or 25 IT professionals that I know about in our country. All of them are using VirtualBox. They are using other solutions as well, like Windows Hypervisor and VMware. The only reason why they do not convert 100% to VirtualBox from Windows Hypervisor and VMware is that they have already invested the money it cost them to get those solutions in the first place.

So, while VirtualBox is absolutely free and they definitely use it in their companies, it cost money for their companies to invest in Windows Hypervisor and VMware. It will not go over well if they just move away from those solutions to VirtualBox because they have already purchased them.

I think it is a very scalable product and it stays stable while you scale it. For example, while it is active on a production server, you can expand the capabilities. You can stop and start or add virtual machines. The only thing that you have to know is not to allocate more resources on that hardware platform than is available in the hardware. The scalability of the hardware is separate from the product itself. You can't scale the product bigger than the resources on the box.

I have used Oracle technical support in the past for other products and I have been satisfied. But I never had to use technical support or any other resource to address problems I had using VirtualBox. There is not one situation where it was necessary.

Setup is so easy to do that I think anyone can do it. It's even easier than installing Windows on a laptop. You spend literally just half-an-hour if you sit and oversee the installation. After that half-an-hour, you are as well-versed in the product as a guy that worked with it for ten years. I don't think the initial setup could be easier.

I can do the implementations all by myself. It is very easy and it was really impossible to make a mistake. 

The product is absolutely free to use.

The VirtualBox solution is an absolute gem of a product. I definitely recommend this product to other people because it's super stable and easy to install and use. The only thing you need to ensure on your server is that you have sufficient hardware resources to accomplish what you want to do and that you supply the server with clean power. The server needs to be running all the time or you will have problems. If you put the box on a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), you are all set.

I choose to run the product on-premises all the time for our deployment and also for deployments to my clients. I also prefer to run VirtualBox on Solaris and Linux. In testing and in production using VirtualBox on Solaris is the best way to go, in my opinion. I do not implement production servers on Windows-based machines because of the many vulnerabilities in Windows. I tend to stay away from Windows as far as possible except for testing purposes on a laptop or a PC that runs Windows. I will use VirtualBox for that.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product an absolute nine. It has a little bit of room for improvement even though it is an excellent product. It is super fast. It is very easy to use. It is rock-solid stable. With just a few more features and added functionality, it will easily reach a ten 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.