Open-Source, but Enterprise-Level Performance.
October 11, 2019
Open-Source, but Enterprise-Level Performance.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle VM VirtualBox
Our testing and core engineering teams are collaboratively using Oracle VM VirtualBox to test the performance and quality of our various standalone applications on different operating systems. When creating applications that run on a consumer's system locally, there is a great deal of uncertainty on whether the given application will work under all types of environments such as type of OS, OS architecture, amount of hardware resources, etc. We are using Oracle VM VirtualBox to eliminate these uncertainties.
- Shared Clipboard between host and virtualized OS. Not only can you copy/paste text, but you can also drag-and-drop files between OS.
- Great Support for USB Devices. Unlike many other alternatives out there, none of them rival VirtualBox in the amount of supported USB Devices.
- Unlimited Number of Snapshots. From my own experience, VirtualBox is the only virtualization solution that supports an unlimited number of saved snapshots.
- High CPU and Memory Utilization. Even when running on more than capable hardware, Oracle VM VirtualBox uses and excessive amount of resources, slowing the host OS down.
- Poor 3D Graphics Support. The amount of settings and features related to enhancing graphics in general is fairly limited for VirtualBox.
- PCIe Passthrough functionality is quite buggy. Many other alternatives have fully implemented this, but VirtualBox has yet to do so.
- Oracle VM VirtualBox is free, so it had no impact on our company's budget.
- As we are now able to patch platform-specific bugs in our software, we have increased customer satisfaction as well as reduced the number of bug tickets.
- We have saved expenses on buying additional hardware to test our applications on different OS's.
- VMware Workstation Player (formerly VMware Player)
As I mentioned earlier, Oracle VM VirtualBox and VMware Workstation offer roughly the same type of features. One of the main differences is that VMware Workstation is a commercial product while Oracle VM VirtualBox is open-source. Resource utilization and graphics support is much better on VMWare, but overall performance is higher with Oracle VM VirtualBox.