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Hyper-V vs Oracle VM VirtualBox vs VMware Workstation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

Server Virtualization Software
Server Virtualization Software
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

Ananth Narayana Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Cost-effective and good for small workloads while addressing update-driven challenges is needed
I use Azure Monitor and other monitoring solutions to support clients in Accenture's managed services. We support multiple environments, primarily on cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, and also on-premises environments with operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Solaris, among others…
Tanvir Siddique - PeerSpot reviewer
Easily accesses open solutions with seamless compatibility for testing and development
The most valuable feature is the seamlessness. When I install a Linux operating system, I can use Windows applications through Oracle VM VirtualBox seamlessly. There are many applications that work only on Windows. For desktop testing purposes, I used Oracle VM VirtualBox, and it works fine. The guest OS compatibility was tremendous because I used Oracle VM VirtualBox on Linux and ran Windows applications on top of that, working seamlessly.
Shambhu Narayan  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-manage solution that has really good customer support compared to other market players
VMware Workstation makes it easy to manage all the resources that we are handling. VMware Workstation has reduced our infrastructure cost. If someone wants machines, I can create them easily using the solution. VMware Workstation is easier to manage than other workstations like Oracle Workstation. VMware Workstation is an easy-to-manage solution, and its support is really good compared to other market players. Overall, I rate VMware Workstation an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Hyper-V is the replica service."
"The replication, creation, and import wizard, as well as the integration with reporting tools, are the most useful features."
"It makes it easier to deploy service. All service tends to migrate onto the server house without having problems now. It is hardware independent."
"It is a very stable product. We have not had any issues with Hyper-V crashing itself."
"There are some products that you can mount over Hyper-V that provide the features that, in today's Hyper-V, are not present."
"It's a stable product."
"One of the most valuable features of Hyper-V is ease to use."
"It is stable."
"I like that it has a snapshot feature."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox has a platform where the support team responds to frequently asked questions by its users. Every time I have had issues with Oracle VM VirtualBox, I always get a solution from Oracle's online platform or GitHub."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"It's very simple to use."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the speed of access and quality of upgrade. Those are the more important and pertinent aspects as far as we were concerned. Functionality and features were relevant for the customers. What a customer chose, we had to make sure that it operated."
"Instead of relying on dual-boot operating systems, I can utilize open-source tools within my infrastructure. This approach allows me to create an in-house cloud platform suitable for testing. VMware Workstation enables me to perform tasks across various operating systems using a single device. It has helped me save time."
"VMware Workstation is great for migrating and patching operating systems."
"The product's initial setup phase was simple."
"VMware Workstation works correctly and has more features compared to Oracle VirtualBox."
"VMware Workstation is easy to manage and understand."
"The performance is good."
"The simplicity of the deployment and the implementation, and the footprint for the hardware are some of the solution's valuable features."
 

Cons

"It would be better if it demanded less memory. Once you have allocated those memory spaces for the installed server, fewer resources are left to allocate for the Hyper-V virtual environment. That's the drawback with that. For example, once you install Windows 10, and let's say Windows 2019, Windows 2019 will take at least 10 GB of memory. If a customer has only 16 GB of RAM on the system, they think of installing Hyper-V. Because when you have windows 2019 or something else, they give two free Hyper-V virtual licenses. But we can't because there's not enough memory. We can, however, install this as a VMS. But this UI isn't that user-friendly for most customers. They like to have a user interface with VMI, and it's not easy when you install VMI. It would also be better if they can improve their core Hyper-V version to be a bit more familiar and user-friendly with its interface. I think it would be much easier. We had a few issues with the VM Hyper-V virtual network. Once you have such issues, it's very difficult to find out where they came from. They had such issues, and we had to resolve the system again. But other than that, if it's useful and keeps working nicely, it will work very nicely even if something happens. But it's very hectic and challenging to find out where it's happening. In the next release, it would be better to control this data store part in a manageable way. This is because once we install and create a Hyper-V machine, it goes everywhere. It would be better if it had a single location and a single folder with a heartbeat and virtual machine information. You can just go forward, and the data store and everything are going into one place like the C drive. But something always goes fast, or everything gets lost if the customer doesn't manually change the direction of where the virtual hard drive routes, the more serious the problem. It would be better if they could merge all that together. This includes the virtual machine and the virtual hard drive in the same folder when creating the virtual machine. I think that it would be much easier to manage and in case something happens. Technical support also could be better."
"It would be nice if it was turned into its own product because that's the problem with it. It doesn't have a single place where you can manage things. You have to go into all different screens to be able to configure it. And then you have no idea what the performance is. It's really just a feature added to Windows, and Microsoft does not really have anything that pulls it all together well. Compared to VMware, it does not have everything collaborate on one screen."
"It should be deployed with OS so there is no need to install OS separately, only select the OS and get it ready."
"Hyper-V doesn't have a lot of features and is limited compared to other virtualization software."
"They could work on lowering the cost of the solution."
"It might make it easier to move VMs across Hotmail hosts. This application process make it a little bit easier."
"There are some storage problems which do occur in high load systems, especially SQL workloads."
"The backup site could be better. We used to face a lot of issues, and we are looking to solve that now. We are in the process of moving all the infrastructure to the cloud. It could also use more integration on the management part. We also need more integration on the monitoring sites."
"It has some issues when you have some weird device drivers. For instance, when you have a weird sound driver working on your machine, and the VirtualBox needs to output the sound of the virtual machine into the sound driver of the physical machine, the bare metal, it doesn't work too well. If you tweak lots of drivers and play around with the different kinds of drivers and machines, you will probably break something. I have not played with it too much and maybe it already supports it, but it would probably be good to have the ability to use a container from the virtual machine environment instead of spinning off a complete virtual machine. There are other tools for that. On Linux, you have a DXE, LXC framework, and you have Docker as well. Docker is good because it is multi-platform, and you can run Docker on pretty much anything, even different processors, but it would be good if we had a VirtualBox running on it while spinning off containers instead of full virtual machines. The other thing that will become important, and I'm pretty sure that they are thinking about it as well is that there's this new hardware platform that Apple is releasing, which is an ARM-based new chip. So, VirtualBox will probably have to work on ARM-based CPUs as well."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The tool has some stability issues."
"Oracle needs to improve its hot virtual machine migration. It didn't work as intended. It should allow us to migrate between virtual machines, without stopping the database."
"Oracle’s support team should improve its response time."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible, It's not like VMware."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
"The product is outdated."
"The tool can improve network storage technology."
"The problem we are facing with stability is that the network adapter causes crashes of the VM when we're using it for developing purposes."
"The GUI interface could be improved."
"The solution should provide a guide on its installation."
"The support can be improved."
"My experience with Workstation is limited, so I don't know all the functionalities of this tool. Maybe Workstation could add some more compatibility with other vendors."
"VMware Player should provide a cloud version with no limitations to hardware resources."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is quite fair. It is not too expensive."
"Microsoft recently tacked on a higher price for their software to use the storage migration in the Storage Spaces Direct array. That was just terrible."
"The licensing is pretty straightforward."
"The licensing costs depend on the environment you have. If you have an environment of less than 10 or 30 VMs, It's nice to have a Hyper-V, but if you have more than 100 or 200, I would recommend using VCenter, VMware virtualization, especially for an on-premise solution."
"We rent our licenses for this solution, which means that we also have access to premium-level support. The rental cost is payable annually and includes a number of products that work with this solution. It also allows us to run unlimited virtual machines without needing a license for each one."
"The Hyper-V pricing and licensing are very good."
"It's not expensive."
"The pricing and licensing is fine."
"The solution is free."
"There are no licensing fees."
"It is pretty good for the price, which is free."
"Price wise, Oracle VM VirtualBox is a six on a scale from one to ten."
"Available for free use"
"Oracle should consider reducing the cost of the product."
"It is a very cost-effective solution."
"The tool is not as expensive as other products."
"It has the best licensing modules."
"The product is expensive."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The price of the solution per workstation is approximately 200 Francs annually. We pay a total of 800 francs. Everything is included in the price such as the support."
"VMware Workstation has a high price than competitors in the market."
"The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you."
"VMware Workstation's costs are lifetime."
"VMware is expensive. Licensing can be tricky. For example, I recently had a client running VMware vSphere Essentials and wanted to migrate to a more scalable solution. However, they had no choice but to purchase a completely new license and deploy a completely new instance of VMware."
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Comparison Review

it_user234735 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 10, 2015
Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5
I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does KVM compare with Hyper-V?
KVM is better. But let's just look at the software instead of judging. Hyper-V was a free solution from Microsoft to ...
How does Proxmox VE compare with Hyper-V?
One of the best things about Proxmox VE is that it is open-source and very inexpensive. You get all of the same featu...
What do you like most about Hyper-V?
The initial setup is not difficult at all. It is very easy.
How does KVM compare to Oracle VM VirtualBox?
KVM is easy to use, stable and flexible. It is mature and very fast. It is an affordable open-source solution that is...
What do you like most about Oracle VM VirtualBox?
The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle VM VirtualBox?
Maintenance is not necessary because I did not use it for heavy loads.
Which VMware solution would you go with - Workstation or vSphere?
VM Workstation’s setup is so easy, you can use it almost instantly, it works well with Windows and Linux. We like VM ...
What do you like most about VMware Workstation?
The product is stable, very easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to configure, and easy to set up.
What needs improvement with VMware Workstation?
The product's integration capabilities are an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Large customer base from all industries, all over the world. Two major Hyper-V customers are Telefonica and EmpireCLS.
Airbus, Colorado State University, SCS Africa, Wolf Medical Systems.
Akademiska Hus
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