If there were more API access so that I could run it headlessly, similar to Proxmox where I can use API, it would be useful. Having some kind of API to maintain Oracle VM VirtualBox would be beneficial.
The tool has some stability issues. Sometimes, the virtual machines just stop working without any apparent reason. That's why I'm migrating to KVM. I've managed to use other IT resources, like distributed storage, to reach an HA environment using VirtualBox. It would be very good if VirtualBox had its own high-availability environment. It will be a very good improvement.
The interface options of the solution should be more user-friendly and easy to comprehend. For instance, when I am using the solution on full screen mode, sometimes I am unable to identify how to exit the present screen. Oracle VM VirtualBox should have a community to ask certain technical queries.
Senior System Engineer at Microstuf Computers Clinic Inc
Real User
Feb 22, 2024
They could improve the graphics functionality of the product. At present, we encounter challenges related to display resolution while scrolling up and down through the taskbar.
Adjunct Professor at a university with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Oct 12, 2023
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.
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.
The solution is not flexible. Compared to other solutions which are easy to customize, Oracle VirtualBox is extremely difficult to customize compared to VMware. It is not suitable for an enterprise environment. The user interface can be improved. I would like to have AI included in a future release.
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.
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!
They have to improve the user interface and the installation. Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible. It's not like VMware. They could also improve the market position. Customers are more familiar with the VMware brand and prefer to use it. Because they don't push the market a lot, the customers are not aware of Oracle VM VirtualBox, and its capabilities.
The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive. Currently, when pilot testing VMs, sometimes we have to test them on the cloud — this is complicated. In the next release, it would be nice if there was a convenient way to migrate the VM images from the local server to the cloud server.
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.
When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs. There are times when I need to reboot the system to resolve the problem. I have 64 gig RAM in my machine, and an i7 processor, so there is no issue as far as memory is concerned.
Director of Engineering at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Dec 16, 2020
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.
IT Staff; Programmer at a university with 51-200 employees
Real User
Nov 20, 2020
I would like there to be a web version of the solution, wherein I can access it over my network. It would be ideal if it was more web-based. The memory and hardware usage could be a little bit lighter. Right now, it's quite heavy on the usage. The CPU usage should be lower.
The solution needs support for the USB 3. The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine. The product needs to make dramatic changes to the guest machines. For example, they need to improve changing the disks, and the resources used and to make the back and forth transfer to other platforms like Nutanix, VMware, or Microsoft.
We are currently on version 5.1.38 but we are definitely going to upgrade to version 6. Some of what I would like to see in the future may already be in that release. For me, it would be great to have a function where I can teleport from one machine to another machine just using the GUI. At the moment, this capability is only available via the command line. Other products like VMware and Windows Hypervisor already have that functionality. I think it would be an excellent addition and improve the product if Oracle implemented this functionality directly in the GUI. The feature I would like in addition to teleporting is that I would like to see more reporting capabilities. For example, it would be good to be able to easily report on the status of the servers and virtual machines. It would be enough just to get a list that says how much CPU power each machine is using, the amount of memory it occupies, etcetera. Something like a snapshot of everything in graphical format. A dashboard that actually combines all the reporting about what is happening on your virtualization would be valuable. Getting all the information at a glance is what I would like to see.
Head Of Information Technology at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Oct 16, 2019
I have to keep pressing the home key so that the mouse changes context, which is something that I don't like. It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically. This solution cannot run when Hyper-V is running, and it would be nice if these two solutions could co-exist. I have never used this solution for production, but I wish there was a simpler way of deployment, and I wish there was an ecosystem around it. Some other solutions, such as Docker, have a whole surrounding ecosystem. You know where to get Docker files, you know what Docker works with, etc. It's a whole ecosystem instead of a single application. It comes with almost everything you need in one place, or in the community.
Senior Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Oct 15, 2019
VirtualBox is more of a desktop deployment, so we don't really use it in production workloads. For improvement, compatibility with other virtual machine systems would be helpful. The ability to deploy the imagine of other virtual machines and convert it to a virtual desktop environment needs to be better. The solution should have more enterprise features, like migration, high availability storage, disaster recovery, and the ability to deploy to enterprise-scale usage. They should not just offer desktop usage.
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.
The solution should work to simplify the system. However, it should be flexible enough to allow for special cases. The solution should also make little improvements and tweaks to performance, reliability, redundancy, and DR systems. There should be better recovery offered to protect and ensure the application of systems and backups. More information about administration features, like the replication feature, should be provided.
IT Manager at a non-tech company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Oct 10, 2019
The product needs better support for multiple network cards. That is the major area that sometimes it can be a bit of a mess to configure multiple network cards to communicate well with each other. That's the major thing for me. Another thing I've run into is that it would be nice on Oracle if you can use something like a Hyper-V environment. You can just install the environment and then start installing all your virtual machines on top of that. Rather than having to install Windows or Linux when you need them, you just install the VirtualBox. If it can just roll out on its own and had its own hyper vista software — that would be something I've been praying to see from Oracle VirtualBox. I think also that a challenge I've seen some people have after I convince them to use the product is when they are switching to various views. In some situations, the view switches to a seamless full screen and the menu bar disappears. When this happens they may not know how to switch it back. I don't know if Oracle can put a button on-screen so that when you are in a seamless view or scale view or something like that so those familiar things still fit where you can find them. In fullscreen, you still have the menu, but in some of these screen views that don't have the menu, they could put a visible button that can bring the menu back up. With that, you can easily get back familiar controls and eject your USB or whatever you need to do. If you don't know the shortcuts, it can be difficult to navigate or do even common tasks. They need something else instead of just using keyboard shortcuts.
student at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Dec 10, 2018
The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow. The networking needs to be a bit more robust. Also, it continues to upgrade itself, and I would like an option to switch this off because it causes slowdowns for the network. In addition, I think that there should be some separate bits of software to install to make it communicate better with Windows. There should be a default installation to do this.
The user interface I find to be lacking. If you compare it with VMware or Hyper-V, you have lots of room for improvement. I think that VirtualBox should be more user-friendly.
Oracle VM VirtualBox is a cost-free, user-friendly virtual machine platform that supports multiple operating systems and offers features like snapshots and seamless file sharing while allowing the execution of diverse environments on one machine.Guests on Oracle VM VirtualBox benefit from its ease of setup, support for multiple OS, and advanced features like cloning and Remote Desktop Protocol access. Its compatibility with formats such as VMware and QEMU enhances its adaptability. However,...
If there were more API access so that I could run it headlessly, similar to Proxmox where I can use API, it would be useful. Having some kind of API to maintain Oracle VM VirtualBox would be beneficial.
I am unaware of any areas where Oracle VM VirtualBox could be improved. It is a good tool that works well.
The tool has some stability issues. Sometimes, the virtual machines just stop working without any apparent reason. That's why I'm migrating to KVM. I've managed to use other IT resources, like distributed storage, to reach an HA environment using VirtualBox. It would be very good if VirtualBox had its own high-availability environment. It will be a very good improvement.
The interface options of the solution should be more user-friendly and easy to comprehend. For instance, when I am using the solution on full screen mode, sometimes I am unable to identify how to exit the present screen. Oracle VM VirtualBox should have a community to ask certain technical queries.
They could improve the graphics functionality of the product. At present, we encounter challenges related to display resolution while scrolling up and down through the taskbar.
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.
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.
Improvement-wise, the product needs to be made scalable.
The solution is a bit less stable than I would like.
The solution is not flexible. Compared to other solutions which are easy to customize, Oracle VirtualBox is extremely difficult to customize compared to VMware. It is not suitable for an enterprise environment. The user interface can be improved. I would like to have AI included in a future release.
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.
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!
There are a few bugs that need to be updated.
The solution could be more user-friendly.
They have to improve the user interface and the installation. Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible. It's not like VMware. They could also improve the market position. Customers are more familiar with the VMware brand and prefer to use it. Because they don't push the market a lot, the customers are not aware of Oracle VM VirtualBox, and its capabilities.
The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive. Currently, when pilot testing VMs, sometimes we have to test them on the cloud — this is complicated. In the next release, it would be nice if there was a convenient way to migrate the VM images from the local server to the cloud server.
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.
When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs. There are times when I need to reboot the system to resolve the problem. I have 64 gig RAM in my machine, and an i7 processor, so there is no issue as far as memory is concerned.
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 would like there to be a web version of the solution, wherein I can access it over my network. It would be ideal if it was more web-based. The memory and hardware usage could be a little bit lighter. Right now, it's quite heavy on the usage. The CPU usage should be lower.
The solution needs support for the USB 3. The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine. The product needs to make dramatic changes to the guest machines. For example, they need to improve changing the disks, and the resources used and to make the back and forth transfer to other platforms like Nutanix, VMware, or Microsoft.
We are currently on version 5.1.38 but we are definitely going to upgrade to version 6. Some of what I would like to see in the future may already be in that release. For me, it would be great to have a function where I can teleport from one machine to another machine just using the GUI. At the moment, this capability is only available via the command line. Other products like VMware and Windows Hypervisor already have that functionality. I think it would be an excellent addition and improve the product if Oracle implemented this functionality directly in the GUI. The feature I would like in addition to teleporting is that I would like to see more reporting capabilities. For example, it would be good to be able to easily report on the status of the servers and virtual machines. It would be enough just to get a list that says how much CPU power each machine is using, the amount of memory it occupies, etcetera. Something like a snapshot of everything in graphical format. A dashboard that actually combines all the reporting about what is happening on your virtualization would be valuable. Getting all the information at a glance is what I would like to see.
I have to keep pressing the home key so that the mouse changes context, which is something that I don't like. It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically. This solution cannot run when Hyper-V is running, and it would be nice if these two solutions could co-exist. I have never used this solution for production, but I wish there was a simpler way of deployment, and I wish there was an ecosystem around it. Some other solutions, such as Docker, have a whole surrounding ecosystem. You know where to get Docker files, you know what Docker works with, etc. It's a whole ecosystem instead of a single application. It comes with almost everything you need in one place, or in the community.
This solution is not enterprise-ready. The user interface needs to be improved.
VirtualBox is more of a desktop deployment, so we don't really use it in production workloads. For improvement, compatibility with other virtual machine systems would be helpful. The ability to deploy the imagine of other virtual machines and convert it to a virtual desktop environment needs to be better. The solution should have more enterprise features, like migration, high availability storage, disaster recovery, and the ability to deploy to enterprise-scale usage. They should not just offer desktop usage.
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.
The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities.
The solution needs to improve its flexibility. It's not as flexible as VMware.
The technical support needs to improve.
The solution should work to simplify the system. However, it should be flexible enough to allow for special cases. The solution should also make little improvements and tweaks to performance, reliability, redundancy, and DR systems. There should be better recovery offered to protect and ensure the application of systems and backups. More information about administration features, like the replication feature, should be provided.
The product needs better support for multiple network cards. That is the major area that sometimes it can be a bit of a mess to configure multiple network cards to communicate well with each other. That's the major thing for me. Another thing I've run into is that it would be nice on Oracle if you can use something like a Hyper-V environment. You can just install the environment and then start installing all your virtual machines on top of that. Rather than having to install Windows or Linux when you need them, you just install the VirtualBox. If it can just roll out on its own and had its own hyper vista software — that would be something I've been praying to see from Oracle VirtualBox. I think also that a challenge I've seen some people have after I convince them to use the product is when they are switching to various views. In some situations, the view switches to a seamless full screen and the menu bar disappears. When this happens they may not know how to switch it back. I don't know if Oracle can put a button on-screen so that when you are in a seamless view or scale view or something like that so those familiar things still fit where you can find them. In fullscreen, you still have the menu, but in some of these screen views that don't have the menu, they could put a visible button that can bring the menu back up. With that, you can easily get back familiar controls and eject your USB or whatever you need to do. If you don't know the shortcuts, it can be difficult to navigate or do even common tasks. They need something else instead of just using keyboard shortcuts.
The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow. The networking needs to be a bit more robust. Also, it continues to upgrade itself, and I would like an option to switch this off because it causes slowdowns for the network. In addition, I think that there should be some separate bits of software to install to make it communicate better with Windows. There should be a default installation to do this.
The user interface I find to be lacking. If you compare it with VMware or Hyper-V, you have lots of room for improvement. I think that VirtualBox should be more user-friendly.
I think this solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management, and using centralized data storage.