Fantastic and Free
We used Oracle VM VirtualBox as a quick and simple way to virtualize and consolidate multiple compute servers onto a single server. It is …
Overview
What is Oracle VM VirtualBox?
Open source, cross-platform, virtualization software that enables developers to deliver code faster by running multiple operating systems on a single device, used to deploy applications on-premises and to the cloud. Oracle VM VIrtualBox is Oracle's cross-platform virtualization offering, acquired with…
Recent Reviews
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Live virtual machine backup (37)8.282%
- Virtual machine automated provisioning (36)7.878%
- Management console (44)7.272%
- Live virtual machine migration (32)6.969%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
N/A
Unavailable
What is Oracle VM VirtualBox?
Open source, cross-platform, virtualization software that enables developers to deliver code faster by running multiple operating systems on a single device, used to deploy applications on-premises and to the cloud. Oracle VM VIrtualBox is Oracle's cross-platform virtualization offering, acquired…
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
47 people also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
What is IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions?
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions is designed to make cloud adoption easier, allowing the user to optimize the value of existing on-premises infrastructure, while leveraging the same tools, technologies and skills in the cloud. The solution provides rapid scalability, deployment in 35+ global data…
Product Demos
Building a Demo Environment using Oracle VM VirtualBox Part 2
YouTube
Export Any OS From Oracle VM VirtualBox
YouTube
Oracle VirtualBox | Basic functionalities and live demo
YouTube
Building a Demo Environment using Oracle VM VirtualBox
YouTube
Demo - Building reliable Oracle Database 18c DevOps
YouTube
VirtualBox Demo 1 - Work with Critical Applications Securely (For end users)
YouTube
Features
Return to navigation
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Oracle VM VirtualBox?
Open source, cross-platform, virtualization software that enables developers to deliver code faster by running multiple operating systems on a single device, used to deploy applications on-premises and to the cloud. Oracle VM VIrtualBox is Oracle's cross-platform virtualization offering, acquired with Sun Microsystems in early 2010. The software was originally developed by Innotek GmbH.
Oracle VM VirtualBox Videos
VirtualBox Demo
To help you decide if VirtualBox is right for you, we've synthesized reviews from TrustRadius to see what the strengths, limitations, and best use cases of VirtualBox are.
Oracle VM VirtualBox Competitors
Oracle VM VirtualBox Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Open source, cross-platform, virtualization software that enables developers to deliver code faster by running multiple operating systems on a single device, used to deploy applications on-premises and to the cloud. Oracle VM VIrtualBox is Oracle's cross-platform virtualization offering, acquired with Sun Microsystems in early 2010. The software was originally developed by Innotek GmbH.
Hyper-V, Parallels Desktop, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are common alternatives for Oracle VM VirtualBox.
Reviewers rate Live virtual machine backup highest, with a score of 8.2.
The most common users of Oracle VM VirtualBox are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(151)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-12 of 12)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
May 10, 2023
Fantastic and Free
We used Oracle VM VirtualBox as a quick and simple way to virtualize and consolidate multiple compute servers onto a single server. It is an easier way to provide a proof of concept for virtualization than using a bare metal hypervisor with an admin machine. Once the concept successfully shows the benefits of virtualization and the advantages of consolidating to a lower server footprint, it is easier to sell virtualization. In addition, snapshots, software defined networking, and ability to access/share host resources make it easier to roll back/deploy changes to development, test, and QA environments. On top of all that, it is free to use.
- Ability to easily share/access host resources; allows for development work on the host machine that can be easily transferred to the guest machines and vice versa.
- Advanced bootup/bios options allow for a custom deployment scenario, test platform.
- Full product and all options are free to use, unlimited.
- Very small installation footprint and memory use.
- Interface is clean, but could be more sleek.
- Guest systems need to be shutdown in order to make edit any resources. This can be a bit disruptive. Not ideal for Production environments.
- The add-on extensions can be a bit confusing and need to be updated separately. They should be bundled together with the main application to ease updates and keep current.
December 31, 2021
VirtualBox the best for virtualization!
I personally use VirtualBox to test applications. With VirtualBox, I can test the application without even installing it on my actual machine, and doing this protects my device from any damages. For example, if I accidentally select the wrong settings for the application I am testing, the changes only affect my Virtual Machine and this is a great advantage for me. I also use different operating systems for work and for personal purposes thus I use VirtualBox to install another operating system (like Linux) without removing the one I already use (Windows).
- Allocating the memory you want for each machine.
- Allows you to put as many virtual machines as your device allows you.
- The changes you make to your virtual machine only affects your virtual machine, not your main device.
- It would be great if the window can become adjustable to full screen because right now you need to install another software to just make the window fullscreen.
- The responsiveness of the VMs is slow sometimes.
- It sometimes takes very long for a machine to boot.
August 10, 2021
Oracle at it again with good and powerful products
We used Oracle's solution to simulate environments and test future changes, updates, and patches on our software. We also used it for training sessions in order not to disturb production environments, while still simulating the real world with exact OS and SW versions.
VirtualBox made our testing way cheaper, easy, and less punitive because if anything went wrong we could simply revert to a past snapshot and document the results.
- Virtualization
- Testing of environments with any harm to production
- Compatibility with older OS
- User interface feels like I'm really using some 00's software
- VM configurations are clumsy and hard to follow if you don't have much experience
Oracle VM VirtualBox is used to house VM's to test different applications on Virtual machines in order to validate functionality without the worry of compromising a real system and having to start over. We also use these VM's to obfuscate access to our production environments by first accessing a VM then connecting to a VPN from that virtual machine.
- Running multiple VM's on a simple laptop or desktop
- Making a backup of a VM to quickly roll back to a known good state
- Easy deployment of various operating system types and configurations
- Reporting is a little lacking
- Network settings for VM's can be hard to find or understand for the casual user
July 23, 2020
Virtualization at its Best
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Oracle VM VirtualBox is being heavily used to recreate network designs on servers for both troubleshooting purposes as well as deployment scenarios. VMs are generally created to host applications or programs that act as the building blocks for network, which are then imported into GNS3 for laying out the foundation of the network topology. Using such a solution allows the company to save on resources and makes better use of the available resources on the Server stack.
- Optimal utilization of system resources, which in turn does not slow down your computer considerably.
- Immensely popular among developers and students since it is free.
- A well laid out user interface displaying all the VMs and giving details on each of them when selected.
- For first timers it can be challenging.
- Lacks in documentation because of it being open-source.
- Redundant configuration for new VMs could be reduced by providing a universal configuration tool.
February 26, 2020
A no-cost and really good virtualization software platform.
It is being used more at the department level than across the whole organization. It is really up to individual departments to decide if they want to use VirtualBox for managing VM's. It addresses the business problem of having a VM management all-in-one-solution that can manage most platforms in use today (e.g. Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc.) Some solutions don't offer support for most all platforms, or some are more problematic when it comes to managing the wide array of platforms out there.
- One thing it does really well is the actual interface (home screen) of the management console. It is well laid out as far as showing you the VM's you have installed and giving information on each of those VM's (such as General information, System Information, etc.).
- Another good feature of VirtualBox is it generally doesn't use a whole lot of system resources for the most part, and generally won't slow down a computer too much while it is in use.
- One thing that could be worked on is improving how the program affects system resources when running multiple VM's at the same time. For the most part, running just 1 VM doesn't tax system resources too much, but if you run multiple VM's, you may experience system slowdowns or other performance issues.
- Another improvement can be made in how VirtualBox detects the host system to determine whether the host is 32-bit or 64-bit. My experience was that the application came back saying my system didn't have a 64-bit processor, but in fact it did, and it was running the 64-bit OS.
VirtualBox is a very light-weight software which is available as a hypervisor. This software can be installed on any OS (Windows, Mac or any flavour of Linux) and be leveraged for virtualization. Within our organisation, VirtualBox is used by couple of departments. The departments which handle the internal and external development or testing of the applications highly rely on this piece of software. As per business problems, it is always better to have 10 machines in a single base machine rather than 10 different physical machines. So with VirtualBox these types of problems are solved and multiple systems/ servers are deployed in the base machine which help us to do multiple tasks and once and keep a number of servers live at a single point in time.
- Total size of the software: is one of the best part of this hypervisor. I have used tons in my career and this is the lightest among all of them so far. This is a great plus point because:
- It keeps you hard disk happy because whatever space the virtual instance will take is the only space being occupied since the space captured by the software is negligible.
- The performance of the CPU as well as the virtualisation engine boosts up to a very huge level.
- Supports up to 32 virtual machines: This software can hold the power of 32 virtual machines which might take up physical space of the entire small sized office. This can hold an entire company in one installation of VirtualBox.
- Support for all the OS: It can be installed either in Mac or Linux and of course the widely used Windows and all of them can be linked in a local network seamlessly. So there are no such boundaries regarding the Operating Systems.
- VirtualBox still have some features which I am still not able to understand even after having used the software from so long time. I have never found proper videos which provide full fledged training materials on this software. This is a big lag as there might be some option available that can help in our day to day life, but we are still not aware about that option.
- The design can be revamped and transformed to a fancy one. There are no animations and even the Mac version of the software contains comes pixels at times. This can decrease the overall liking of the people which can become a serious issue in the near future.
September 17, 2019
Excellent solution for quickly deploying VM environments
I used VirtualBox to test various operating system configurations, and occasionally to enable users to use Windows applications on Mac computers. I've used various virtualization suites such as Parallels VM but VirtualBox is easy to deploy and gets the job done without having to worry about costly upgrade fees. I especially have had better luck networking virtual machines than with other virtualization solutions.
- Networking
- Cross-platform compatibility
- Testing
- Speed of installation
- I've found it could use better and more detailed settings for optimizing the screen output for various displays.
March 12, 2018
Our VM Box Usage Review
It is being used to build virtual Linux instances on Windows X86 boxes to help facilitate our DevOps processes and development processes, including our move to containers. It allows the ability to do this without the developers having to have full admin rights on their machines.
- Creating of VMs for Linux with very little work
- Facilitating the use of docker and containerizing workloads via development desktops
- Provides standard ways to share environments between developers
- It takes a while to start up
- Slows down machines a bit
February 27, 2018
A review of Oracle VirtualBox by a simple software engineer
We currently use VirtualBox to deploy our testing VMs. As our primary developer on our installer, we support over 5 operating systems. Each of those OSs can have different flavors and versions we support as well. We use VirtualBox to locally store multiple VMs that will be booted up to be tested on.
- It is open source, easy to install, and generally a very easy application to get started with.
- All the core functionality of what you expect from a VM manager is there. Save state, rollback, and partitions. All this is done without overly complicated menus or instructions.
- Very popular and well used. This is very nice when looking for help or documentation.
- Overall compared to the more expensive VM software, it can be a bit sluggish at times.
- Full-screen mode can be cumbersome. I have often had an issue with VirtualBox rendering my VMs correctly in full-screen mode.
November 08, 2017
VirtualBox, keeping development environments consistent
We use VirtualBox so that everyone can have, build, and share standard developer environments. If there is an issue with an environment, one can rebuild it if needed. As the environment changes or needs updating, everyone can run the same build scripts to do so. By taking snap shots of the VM, we can also roll back to a previous states in the development environment if an update does not go as planned.
- VM's provide a common development environment across all developers
- VM's allow moving an existing environment form an old system to a new system with less setup
- The only downside of running a VM along side another system is the memory usage. Once we have two OS's running at the same time your RAM is split in half, or how everyone allocated it. If we allow the VM to use 8GB it will take all 8GB regardless if it is using it or not. Ideally the VM will allocate or release the RAM as needed.
September 29, 2017
VirtualBox is 'virtually' the best free VM engine out there!
Used by a wide range of employees both individually and within teams to create and manage test networks for new software. Allows the end user to implement and explore new software, to test suitability for business needs, and even the compatibility of said software into the system already in place.
Additionally, we can create internal networks or similar environments which are not on the business network and then use them for training exercises and the like with no risk to the wider network.
And, of course IT'S FREE.
Additionally, we can create internal networks or similar environments which are not on the business network and then use them for training exercises and the like with no risk to the wider network.
And, of course IT'S FREE.
- Manages multiple VM's simultaneously. As a software used to create environments with several machines, this is a great strength.
- Allows a bridged network to be built with extreme ease.
- Central dashboard is concise and informative, without being cluttered.
- Seriously easy to pick up as a first time user. Never counter-intuitive.
- Can be run across a range of OS - not restricted to Windows !
- Full screen mode - it is not always the easiest job getting out of a machine when in full screen mode.
- Network settings - all new VM's use NAT by default, which whilst ok for most may be an annoyance if you want a Bridged network in place - you have to power down the machine to change the network settings each time.
- Lacks in system integration features that paid-for competitors do have, such as printing direct to host's printer. Minor annoyance for network building purposes however.