A review of Oracle VirtualBox by a simple software engineer
February 27, 2018
A review of Oracle VirtualBox by a simple software engineer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle VM VirtualBox
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.
- Considering we use VB to deploy VMs for testing, it saves us tons fn money from not allowing us to have to spin up an Amazon EC2 instance for every VM we need testing for.
Personal experience - I find VMware Workstation has more features, but VB is cheaper and much easier to use for simple VM deployment. Ultimately the cost won out over the features. That is why we use VB.