We performed a comparison between IBM PowerVM and Oracle VM VirtualBox based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Server Virtualization Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Technical support is great."
"It is a stable solution with reliable performance."
"You can increase resources with it automatically."
"The most valuable feature of IBM PowerVM is the performance of the database workload."
"The most valuable features in this solution are you do not get degradation in the performance like you could get in other solutions. There is a physical adapter that is better than a virtual one and you can assign adapters to a VM."
"IBM PowerVM has the highest clock speed."
"A valuable feature of PowerVM is a feature that is used for higher availability plus stream for posting, which is very useful. There's a flash copy feature which we are using. PowerVM itself, I know, helps us to control and manage our Oracle licensing compliance, since it is our hardware partitioning. This is very important. If you use VMware, there will be a licensing issue. This PowerVM is a hardware partitioner, which is very important for license compliance. We are happy with this solution."
"Active Memory Sharing dynamically reallocates memory of running partitions based on changing workload demands. The memory for the pool is carved out from Physical memory and is made logical memory. The said memory is not available to be assigned to partitions as dedicated memory. A min, max and desired as well as weight is assigned to the memory of each lpar to help hypervisor make a decision in case a condition where priority is to be given to a certain lapr to use the memory form shared pool."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is easy to use."
"It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"I like that it is free and runs on Linux/Ubuntu - I wouldn't use any other solution. I am able to perform small developing tests."
"The solution has high performance and is easy to use."
"It's very simple to use."
"Oracle VM Virtualbox is easy to use and does not require much training."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"This solution is lacking the ability to have servers act as a cluster, such as in VMware. IBM has come out with a feature similar to VMware's vCenter but it is not as mature. They need to add LPM shared-nothing feature, such as in vMotion."
"The licensing could be better."
"The cost of this solution is high."
"IBM PowerVM does not integrate with Microsoft."
"IBM PowerVM could improve the price because it is expensive."
"A GUI version of VIOS would be a great plus for people moving from Intel-based hypervisors."
"The hardware licensing model could be improved because the licensing model is a bit different from the standard hardware procured."
"I don't know whether this has been trialed already, but IBM should give us an alert when we reach seven or eight failovers so that we can automatically switch it to manual mode. That would be great because if we cross the 10-day licensing limit, we have to pay a hefty license cost to Oracle. If IBM could view that feature, it would be helpful in license compliance."
"It would be good if we could use Hyper-V Windows subsystems with Linux and VirtualBox on the same instance. Currently, to be able to use VirtualBox, we have to restart the machine into an instance of Windows where Hyper-V is disabled, which is understandably very inconvenient."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"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."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible, It's not like VMware."
"There are a few bugs that need to be updated."
IBM PowerVM is ranked 9th in Server Virtualization Software with 9 reviews while Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 12 reviews. IBM PowerVM is rated 8.8, while Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM PowerVM writes "Faster performance per core without increasing Oracle license compliance and better scalability ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "A free and versatile open-source solution that supports multiple platforms and is easy to set up". IBM PowerVM is most compared with VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, KVM, Proxmox VE and Oracle VM, whereas Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Proxmox VE, KVM, Hyper-V, Oracle VM and OpenVZ. See our IBM PowerVM vs. Oracle VM VirtualBox report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
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