Oracle VM VirtualBox Reviews

We use VirtualBox for client purposes. It's a legacy software.

The fact that it is free is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The management and interface are pretty good. 

It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring.

Integrations are pretty easy to implement.

I would like there to be a web version of the solution, wherein I can access it over my network. It would be ideal if it was more web-based.

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.

I've been using the solution for more than five years at this point.

The solution is very stable. It doesn't have bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The scalability is okay, however, it is limited. It's only about 50% as scalable as I expected it to be.

I've only ever had minor issues in the past, and, when I did reach out to technical support to get assistance, they were able to help. They seem to be quite knowledgeable and responsive. So far, I am satisfied with the level of service provided to my organization.

The initial setup is not complex. It's very straightforward.

Deployment only takes a few hours. It's quite a fast process.

We had it on just one server. It wasn't a big deployment.

We use the solution for free. We don't have to pay for licensing.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

If you're going to use VirtualBox on a small scale, I would recommend it, especially if you are using it for a legacy application.

On-premises

I am running Linux on this solution under Windows.

The cloning feature is a very useful tool. 

The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow. The networking needs to be a bit more robust.

Also, it continues to upgrade itself, and I would like an option to switch this off because it causes slowdowns for the network. 

In addition, I think that there should be some separate bits of software to install to make it communicate better with Windows. There should be a default installation to do this.

One to three years.

I have not needed to scale higher than what I set out to do. Everyone in our company uses the solution. It is used by just 12 staff members. We have one administrator managing the solution.

I never used technical support.

The initial setup was not complex. It is just an environment. The bridging of the network connection can be a bit tricky. The deployment was just a download and a quick setup. 

We did not use a vendor or vendor team, I did the research myself.

I do not have experience with the pricing or licensing of the product.

I also evaluated VMware and Docker before choosing Virtual Box. I chose Virtual Box.

From our use of it, the most valuable feature we've found is that it can quickly deploy new virtual machines.

We need to test our new features in virtual machines before deployment. With VM Virtualbox, we can try our software in virtual machines so that we can find errors, fix them, and then re-test, and we can do this over and over again. Because of this, the Snapshots feature is particularly useful and valuable for us.

If the system that you want to use for virtualization has no 64-bit support, you need to give it instructions on how to enable it through the Intel virtualization technology in BIOS.

I've used it for seven years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We had no stability issues.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Technical support is very good. We can find everything we need to resolve our issues in the support pages online.

We used different products from different vendors, but we chose VirtualBox because it's easy to use and is very stable.

It was very simple to setup.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

We gained a lot of time in the testing phase of free software.

It's free.

I can't do everything I need for virtualization, for example like with vMotion or another solution. You will easily be able to use the software.

Snapshot

Building a sandbox to evaluate the new feature and scrape after tested

Overhead of Memory and CPU resource

More than 6 years (since VirtualBox 1.6)

Not particularly

New release may experience stability issues with a new guest OS such as Windows 8

Due to memory overhead, I would not suggest creating more than 6 VM instances per one physical platform

Customer Service: Moderate (3/5)Technical Support: Moderate (3/5)

VMWarePlayer - no support of Snapshot VirutalPC - unstable and no support for Linux

Pretty easy

In-house team

Minimal - because the setup was straightforward and operation is easy

VMWarePlayer VirtualPC

Community support is the best source for implementation assistance

OracleVM is an excellent alternative to Virtual PC and other client-side virtualization tools.It's mostly open source, and supplies the ability to run virtualized OS's from a lightweight and incredibly user friendly environment.It provides comparable features to other solutions that target the same market, and goes above and beyond in some aspects.Like I said in one of my other reviews, one of the biggest "sellers" for this software, is that it's free. You really cant beat free from a price perspective.

Even with the "add-ons" tools that come with OracleVM, some features that are available in other solutions, are simply not there.One mentioned in another review, is the dragging and dropping of files between host and VM. Another major issue, is that you technically cannot use this software to host a remotely accessible virtual machine without using alternative access software such as VNC or RDP, depending on your virtualized OS.Back when I started using OracleVM, Sun Microsystems was a separate company and it was called Virtualbox. I stopped using it for one reason and one reason only, because Oracle closed off portions of the code, creating an OSE (open source edition) and a CSE (closed source edition) of the software.

This pushed me away, as it used to be wholly open source.

1. OracleVm Virtual box is free. 2. It is relatively fast, with an enjoyable performance. 3. It also allows you to connect to a virtual machine through the Remote Desktop Protocol.

I found it difficult to print from the host printer.Oracle VM Virtualbox is my first choice when it comes to desktop visualization. It doesn’t require any additional skill to deploy. With a simple wizard, I was able to install Windows 8 better edition on my laptop running windows 7. I also have Ubuntu running on the OracleVM.

OracleVM has been helpful to me, as I now test my scripts on different operating systems in a single machine before deploying them. This makes my work much easier, without incurring additional costs. Supporting my remote clients with diverse OS is much easier. All I need to do is open a similar operating system to theirs, in my system, as I guide them through some task. Before now, I had to look for a PC running a similar OS, before guiding them through some tasks.

The most valuable feature for us is deployment of VMware (VMDK) as well as non-VMware (VDI) VMs because most of the test VMs run on ESXi. In our case, we can just switch back and forth by exporting the VM as a VMDK file, which can then be deployed on the ESXi/ VMware player.

Second valuable feature for us is the Virtual Media Manager where we can see all the disks attached to all the VMs and manage them at one place, which is not there in the commercial products as well.

A major improvement we've seen is in the testing of the applications before production deployment. Previously, we used to search for physical machines, install OS, and then install application. Now it runs as a VM where I have a OS exported and saved deployment is clean and easy.

I would like to see VirtualBox as an OS in itself. It boots first and then we get an option to load whichever OS we want on top of it. However, I am unsure if this already exists in some capacity.

I've been using it for close to six years, starting at college. I use it on both Windows and Linux and keep it updated.

There was no issues with the deployment.

Sometimes on the Windows version, the product hangs for reasons unknown, but the Linux version is very stable.

We have had no issues with the scaling.

I've never interacted with the customer service. All the information required was available in the documentation or in forums.

We we also use the VMware workstation, VMware Player.

It's very straightforward, I would say. Just click next couple of times and you are ready to go.

We did it in-house.

Go ahead and try all you can with this product, provided your hardware has enough juice as you can play around a lot with the product.

There are several features we've found valuable, the most valuable of which are --

• the simplicity of the solution;
• the fact that it's multi-platform; and
• it has easy-to-install applications.

It works, and there is active development of the product by Oracle so that it handles OVM templates.

An area of improvement would be the added ability to create the Oracle RAC clusters we now need to edit a properties file in order to make a VM disk sharable. It would be nice to be able to do that from the GUI.

I've been using it for personal use for self-education and training for Linux and Solaris administration, as well as for Oracle products like Database and WebLogic.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

As it's free, the price-per-performance ratio is a big plus.