A no-cost and really good virtualization software platform.
Updated February 26, 2020

A no-cost and really good virtualization software platform.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle VM VirtualBox

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.
  • One positive impact it has had is cost savings, as there is no cost for running the software. There are many other commercial offerings that can get costly, and even some that the licensing has to renew every year/couple of years, but not so with VirtualBox. This can be run without any of those restrictions.
  • Another positive impact it has had is with regards to working well in a production environment, where there are a number of different OS platforms. It has managed these quite well.
With regards to how some of the other virtualization software packages stack up again VirtualBox, I would say VirtualBox is ahead of the game especially when it comes to cost savings, as there is no ongoing cost for running the software. A big disadvantage to one of the other virtualization software packages that is used in our environment in a few instances has been the ongoing subscription/licensing renewal cost, which is done yearly. With VirtualBox, we don't have to worry about keeping up with this.

Another big advantage with VirtualBox as compared to some other software packages is the ability to run/manage a variety of different platforms/OS's as VM's, and also the ability to install/run VirtualBox on a number of different host systems.
It is well suited for organizations that are looking for a low cost, or no cost, VM management solution. Some other commercial solutions can get quite expensive, but the best thing about VirtualBox is it's free. Also, it is well suited to environments that have a lot of different platforms (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) running, or where users are all using different platforms

It is less suited in environments that want to have access to many different channels of support, such as phone, web, email. As an end-user, with VirtualBox, you pretty much have online/KB articles to refer to for help/support with the product, and also a Community forum for getting help/feedback from other users of VirtualBox.

Oracle VM VirtualBox Feature Ratings

Virtual machine automated provisioning
8
Management console
9
Live virtual machine backup
9
Live virtual machine migration
8
Hypervisor-level security
7