We performed a comparison between Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE had a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. However, in terms of features, Oracle VM VirtualBox users felt the solution was unstable, whereas Proxmox VE users felt some bugs needed fixing.
"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."
"This product is very user-friendly and easy to use."
"The solution has high performance and is easy to use."
"The good thing is that it is multi-platform. Once you create a virtual machine in one particular environment, you can switch over to see if you can run it in other environments. For example, if you are on Windows and you create this virtual machine, you can actually go ahead and change the operating system. You can switch it over to Linux or Mac OS and see if you can run the VirtualBox on those particular machines. It even runs on some of the commercial operating systems that are not mainstream, such as Solaris and BSD. These kinds of operating systems are also supported by VirtualBox. The other thing that is good about VirtualBox is that it is open source. So, if you need to do any modifications for your own purposes, you can just download the source, modify it, and deploy it in your environment. It is pretty good and very versatile. You can create and manipulate virtual machines from the command line, which is also very important. It's something that some other products on the desktop side do not have. VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop don't have a good command-line interface to create and manipulate virtual machines, whereas VirtualBox has it out of the box, which is pretty good."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"The solution is very convenient and easy to use."
"Oracle VM Virtualbox is easy to use and does not require much training."
"In addition to the virtualization, the firewall and the routing functions that it provides are valuable."
"Proxmox is free, very stable, and doesn't require more resources for memory RAM. It's fine for a small data center."
"The whole solution is good. It has good tools that help me in managing the servers. It is also stable."
"The setup is very easy."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of deployment."
"That the product is free and still has all the features you expect is a huge benefit."
"It is easy to deploy."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"There are a few bugs that need to be updated."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"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."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible, It's not like VMware."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"It is a good solution, but it is very complicated in some ways. It is not easy. You must have experience in the console mode to do some configurations. A lot of documentation and YouTube videos are available that you can use to learn about it."
"One issue with Proxmox is that some processes are not automatic. For some processes, you have to do it manually by command line."
"It's one of those things for me to move things on to the cloud. It's not so easy. I am always on the laptop and have to monitor that because if you want to make strides; you need to stay online."
"The only issue I have with Proxmox VE is updating it. You have to manually update it or you have to have a way to update it automatically."
"It could have more security updates such as when a new threat is coming into market."
"A feature which should be added is the ability to encrypt the main installation."
"The initial setup has a pretty steep learning curve."
"The availability of the solution could be a bit better."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 14 reviews while Proxmox VE is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 20 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 7.8, while Proxmox VE is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Proxmox VE writes "Rivaling the stiffest and competition in its category this solution suffers only from being young". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with KVM, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Oracle VM and VMware Workstation, whereas Proxmox VE is most compared with Hyper-V, KVM, VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV and Citrix Hypervisor. See our Oracle VM VirtualBox vs. Proxmox VE report.
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Proxmox VE is a very fast and powerful solution. It offers feature-rich virtualization, has open-standards compliance, and also includes redundancy and failover capabilities. What I like about Proxmox VE is that it lets you rack and stack two or more nodes and enables you to be up and running with a one-node failure tolerance in very little time. Proxmox VE’s integration with ZFS is also fantastic. It allows you to create pools to store your VM images and data on very easily and their great web UI makes it easy to check drive health, ZFS scrub status, and other things. I think the best part of the web UI is that everything is configurable from the web user interface without having to use the command line. It also has graphs and additional visualizations so you can evaluate the performance of everything. Beyond that, even though you can use Proxmox VE on a single server, the solution makes it easy to set up a high availability cluster on multiple hosts if needed.
Regarding Oracle VM VirtualBox, I would say its most valuable features are its virtualization, its compatibility with older OSes, and its testing of environments without causing interruptions or any harm to production. Besides making it possible to run multiple VMs on a laptop or desktop, its ease of deployment makes the solution appealing. Not only is it easy to set up, but the software is free. Moreover, it has a nice interface. However, I think Oracle VM VirtualBox could use some improvements on its reporting as well as on its network settings for VMs, which can sometimes be hard for the average user to find and understand.
Conclusion: While Oracle is a safe and excellent option when it comes to virtualizing an operating system, I would suggest Proxmox VE because it is newer, has a lot of powerful features, and is a very reliable and stable solution.