Oracle VM VirtualBox Reviews

I use Oracle VM VirtualBox to provide my clients with performance, security, and scalability enhancements.

I like that Oracle VM is safe and stable. It is also very easy to administer. For example, opening a VM or adding a host adapter is extremely easy.

The most attractive feature in Oracle VM is that it's free except for the extension pack.

Oracle VMs don't have a solid web interface of their own. This is an area where Oracle is lagging behind. Now, we use headless servers, install Oracle VMs, and manage them remotely. We could use phpVirtual Box, but it is a third-party solution. A lot of people contribute to it, and it's not authenticated by Oracle. As a result, I don't find it to be a good option. Therefore, I would like to see Oracle offer an extension pack or a licensed version that fixes this problem.

I've been using this solution for almost four years.

It's a stable solution, and I would rate stability at ten out of ten.

Oracle VM VirtualBox's scalability is good, but resizing of storage can be a bit challenging sometimes. I would give scalability a rating of eight out of ten.

I focus mostly on SMEs, particularly those who run their enterprise solutions on cloud-based services.

The initial deployment is quick and takes about 10 minutes.

I deploy it and maintain it myself, along with the help of an administrator.

Price wise, Oracle VM VirtualBox is a six on a scale from one to ten.

I would definitely recommend Oracle VM VirtualBox. It can work from your laptop, and even a a loop configuration laptop is more than sufficient for testing. Another advantage is that it has teleporting, and you can also directly port your virtual machine configuration into Oracle cloud.

Overall, I would rate Oracle VM VirtualBox at eight out of ten.

I'm a teacher and I use the solution for teaching and testing. 

I have been able to test and roll back features if I need to. I have snapshots and a virtual network if I need to. 

The functionality and productivity are very good.

I can test and roll back features in my work.

It's a big platform. It's very useful.

I like that it has a snapshot feature. 

The virtual network is great. There are a lot of features. It has everything I need.

The product is free to use.

It's easy to set up.

The solution is a bit less stable than I would like. 

I've used the solution for maybe eight years. I have a lot of experience with it. 

The stability needs some improvement. It's less stable than I would like. Sometimes it gets hung up. For example, if I import some files from my students, the files cannot get removed. Instead, it crashes. 

I don't deal with scalability. I just use it on a laptop. I don't use it on a cluster. I don't need to scale. 

Right now, I use it personally for teaching and for my own work.

I've also worked with Workstation.

It is straightforward to set up. It is not complex at all. 

The solution is free to use.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. I've been pleased with its overall capabilities.

I use the solution for personal use and in a professional environment. We use a couple of them. We use it to prepare environments to deploy them on another VM environment like VMware. We need to prepare the machine for the quality and we use this. 

Overall, the solution works very well and we have been happy with it. 

It's easy to configure it on my desktop, have it certified, and then export it to VMware Center.

It's very simple to use.

We like the stability.

The solution can scale well.

To make changes, you need to use the command lines. You need to use them to change the volume or extend or re-sync the volume. We've tried to do so using the web manager and it's not working well. Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement. We'd like the command line to manage the VDI disk.

I've used the solution from the beginning, from the very first one. It's been more than five years. 

The stability of the product is quite good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

I find scalability quite easy. I'm used to it and I know how to handle it. 

We have about ten to 20 people using the product. A few use it on-premises, for example, for the larger service. All people will use it in the cluster.

I've never had to contact technical support and therefore cannot rate their services. 

I've also tried VMware solutions. It's not as fast, the VMware. 

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not overly difficult or complex. 

The deployment is very fast. It takes less than five minutes. It's easy to implement even by yourself.

We have ten technical people using the resolution and helping to deploy and manage it. They are IT managers and engineers. 

It's easy to deploy. You do not need assistance. 

We're still dealing with POCs. In the future, if it works okay, we'll try it in a larger environment. 

I'm just an end-user. 

We are using the latest version of the solution.

The whole solution we are trying to study for large infrastructure and we are making POC of that process. If this works, we will try to generalize it on an older platform.

I'd advise people to try it. It's very simple and easy to deploy.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I use Oracle Virtualbox to create different virtual operating systems, including Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Windows, and Metasploit.

I like that Oracle VM VirtualBox has snapshots with which I can always go back to when my OS was functioning properly, and then I easily clone an OS without having to install it all from scratch.

Oracle VM VirtualBox doesn't work properly with an antivirus tool. I think Oracle has to come up with something that makes VM VirtualBox compatible with different antivirus applications. Though you can get Oracle VM VirtualBox running properly even without an antivirus tool, it keeps you vulnerable.

I have experience with Oracle VM VirtualBox.

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. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with KVM. I have used KVM since my company did software testing for four months. I also use other virtualization services.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

I have mounted it with GlusterFS and I use it along with three on-prem physical nodes with Arch Linux's operating system and 12 VLANs to support around 50 VMs in different environments (TESTS, DEMOS, PRODUCTION).

The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are the most valuable features.

The solution lacks some open source remote administration tools. The reload of individual virtual machine definitions through the vboxweb service (via its API) without restarting it and the access to shared storage (to use teleport functions) need to be improved.

I have been using the Oracle VM VirtualBox since it was owned by Innotek - the original creator of VirtualBox, version 1.5.4, in February 2008.

The stability of the solution has improved over time. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

The solution is scalable but you have to put in a lot of effort to reach the goal. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten. 

There is no technical support from Oracle but there is a community that provides good support. I rate the support a ten out of ten. 

The initial setup is straightforward. I rate the setup a ten out of ten. 

We use the free version. 

I recommend that people look beyond the popular comment of the bit twelve box that it is only for deployments or to test at fault. It's a very powerful tool that needs to be configured properly. 

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution to quickly set up and test our new software releases on different operating system versions.

We used this for onboarding applications running on smaller equipment, as we noticed that it uses less resouces compared to other hypervisor systems.

This helped our passengers to get better services while travelling, such as entertainment, movies, games, details about the trip, et cetera.

The images used can easily be shipped with the onboard hardware.

We can also port or convert other types of images too.

It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge.

It uses less resouces, which is a requirement as it is used on onboard hardware with very litle resources available.

Our development using new operating system releases can quickly be made. In some cases, we can set up the client's environment and perform local investigations to give competitve and qualyfied results for the customers to help reinforce our general reputation.

We keep our build and package down, and only start them when performing nightly builds.

It is easy to set up and makes it easy to protect VM guests running on the systems by IBM Spectrum Protect.

We use SPFS to mount the Spectrum Protect storage as a local filesystem and store our VM backups on that drive-letter or filesystem which sends data to the IBM Spectrum Protect storage.

The backup retentions are centrally managed from the IBM Spectrum Protect backup server.

We can browse and decide which of the backups to restore directly from the Virtualbox system.

This makes data protection very easy to use without special knowledge from agents.

We are using the free version of Virtualbox, so we have not tested the commercial solution.

That said, having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great.

The ability to emulate other types of CPU and hardware, such as PowerPC in both Little Endian and Big Endian, ARM CPU, s390x CPU architectures, and possibly older CPUs such as Motorola would be helpful. This would make the development of new software releases faster and easier.

In general, it is a good and stable product to use. We love it!  

I've used the solution for several years.

We've found the stability to be good.

The scalability is good.

We have never had a need to use technical support so far. 

Neutral

We previously used VMware and Proxmox KVM.

In terms of the initial setup, it's pretty easy to implement. 

We handled the initial setup in-house.

The ROI we've witnessed so far has been good.

We use the free solution; so we can't comment on the pricing at the moment.

We did also look at Proxmox KVM.

For simplicity, I'd advise users to use a backup method that is easy to use and to adapt to hypervisor solutions.

We use SPFS as it helps our clients to backup and restore in the way they understand.

My primary use of the solution is for testing distributions and installations. 

While in the past I used the solution on Linux, which I no longer do, and FreeBSD, which is my daytime runner, I am not very happy with its use on the latter. For the past year or so, it slowed down upon its use. 

I am not a great fan of Oracle's products. I have not been happy with these since version 6. I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly. 

I've been using Oracle VM VirtualBox on and off for five or six years.

I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly.

I have very little to do with technical support. As I have been doing things for nearly 30 years, I solve any issues which may arise on my own. 

The installation is easy, although I could not say how long it took. 

The license I use is free. 

The solution is on-premises as part of the labs. 

As I am the one who tests the solution, I am the only one making use of it in my organization. 

I do not believe that I would recommend the solution to others. 

I rate Oracle VM VirtualBox as a six or seven out of ten.

My personal one is to create virtual machines to do different things within the house. I have a few servers in the house, and the servers themselves run lots of the services that we need, but sometimes you need to have a service that is run on a kind of a "dedicated machine." So, instead of having a physical machine to run those services, we just create a virtual one. It just spins off like a virtual machine, and everything works okay. Some of the machines that are for more home automation and other such things don't need very powerful processes or much memory. They are very suitable to be run on virtual machines. They can have their own IP addresses and can be reached from the outside of the home.

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.

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.

I have been using this solution for a long time. It was a standalone product before it became an Oracle product.

For my users, it is very stable. We do home automation on it, and it works really well. It has some advanced features like auto restart of the virtual machine. If your virtual machine crashes, or even when you have a power outage and the server comes back up on its own, it spins off the virtual machines automatically. You don't have to do anything about it. It is pretty good.

I don't have any impressions on the scalability because I only use it at home, and one of the machines that we have is not so powerful. The other one is a little powerful. So, we can run lots of virtual machines, but we don't run that many.

I needed support just once. It was mostly because I decided to do something that I should not have done. One of the machines that we have is a little older, so I decided to use a method to install a newer version of the operating system, which theoretically is not supported on the machine. There are lots of articles on the web where you can patch this and that to make it work. So, I did it, and unfortunately, it broke VirtualBox. I did not reach directly to customer support, but I posted a question in the community, and we agreed that what I did wasn't a good idea.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, and anyone can do it as long as you know how to install a particular operating system. You just download the executables from the website and run them. They install VirtualBox, and then you just open it up and point it to the disk where you have your operating system, and it does it really fast.

It is pretty good for the price, which is free.

I would rate VirtualBox a nine out of ten. It is really good, and I like it very much. It is definitely not a ten because even though it has lots of support from Oracle itself, it is an open-source product. If you look at the user interface, it is very decent, but it is not the most polished user interface.