Oracle VM VirtualBox Reviews

I am running Linux on this solution under Windows.

The cloning feature is a very useful tool. 

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.

One to three years.

I have not needed to scale higher than what I set out to do. Everyone in our company uses the solution. It is used by just 12 staff members. We have one administrator managing the solution.

I never used technical support.

The initial setup was not complex. It is just an environment. The bridging of the network connection can be a bit tricky. The deployment was just a download and a quick setup. 

We did not use a vendor or vendor team, I did the research myself.

I do not have experience with the pricing or licensing of the product.

I also evaluated VMware and Docker before choosing Virtual Box. I chose Virtual Box.

From our use of it, the most valuable feature we've found is that it can quickly deploy new virtual machines.

We need to test our new features in virtual machines before deployment. With VM Virtualbox, we can try our software in virtual machines so that we can find errors, fix them, and then re-test, and we can do this over and over again. Because of this, the Snapshots feature is particularly useful and valuable for us.

If the system that you want to use for virtualization has no 64-bit support, you need to give it instructions on how to enable it through the Intel virtualization technology in BIOS.

I've used it for seven years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We had no stability issues.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Technical support is very good. We can find everything we need to resolve our issues in the support pages online.

We used different products from different vendors, but we chose VirtualBox because it's easy to use and is very stable.

It was very simple to setup.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

We gained a lot of time in the testing phase of free software.

It's free.

I can't do everything I need for virtualization, for example like with vMotion or another solution. You will easily be able to use the software.

Snapshot

Building a sandbox to evaluate the new feature and scrape after tested

Overhead of Memory and CPU resource

More than 6 years (since VirtualBox 1.6)

Not particularly

New release may experience stability issues with a new guest OS such as Windows 8

Due to memory overhead, I would not suggest creating more than 6 VM instances per one physical platform

Customer Service: Moderate (3/5)Technical Support: Moderate (3/5)

VMWarePlayer - no support of Snapshot VirutalPC - unstable and no support for Linux

Pretty easy

In-house team

Minimal - because the setup was straightforward and operation is easy

VMWarePlayer VirtualPC

Community support is the best source for implementation assistance

OracleVM is an excellent alternative to Virtual PC and other client-side virtualization tools.It's mostly open source, and supplies the ability to run virtualized OS's from a lightweight and incredibly user friendly environment.It provides comparable features to other solutions that target the same market, and goes above and beyond in some aspects.Like I said in one of my other reviews, one of the biggest "sellers" for this software, is that it's free. You really cant beat free from a price perspective.

Even with the "add-ons" tools that come with OracleVM, some features that are available in other solutions, are simply not there.One mentioned in another review, is the dragging and dropping of files between host and VM. Another major issue, is that you technically cannot use this software to host a remotely accessible virtual machine without using alternative access software such as VNC or RDP, depending on your virtualized OS.Back when I started using OracleVM, Sun Microsystems was a separate company and it was called Virtualbox. I stopped using it for one reason and one reason only, because Oracle closed off portions of the code, creating an OSE (open source edition) and a CSE (closed source edition) of the software.

This pushed me away, as it used to be wholly open source.

We use Oracle VM VirtualBox for testing.

Oracle VM VirtualBox is like a virtual machine.

it helps to run multiple operating systems.

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. 

I have been using Oracle VM VirtualBox for one month.

Technical support is good. We don't have any issues with the technical support.

It is easy to install Oracle VM VirtualBox and did not take a lot of time.

For one engineer who has two to three years of experience, it is simple to implement.

There are no licensing fees.

At this time, I cannot recommend this solution to others.

I would rate Oracle VM VirtualBox a five out of ten.

There are several features we've found valuable, the most valuable of which are --

• the simplicity of the solution;
• the fact that it's multi-platform; and
• it has easy-to-install applications.

It works, and there is active development of the product by Oracle so that it handles OVM templates.

An area of improvement would be the added ability to create the Oracle RAC clusters we now need to edit a properties file in order to make a VM disk sharable. It would be nice to be able to do that from the GUI.

I've been using it for personal use for self-education and training for Linux and Solaris administration, as well as for Oracle products like Database and WebLogic.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

As it's free, the price-per-performance ratio is a big plus.

The most valuable feature is the ability to spring up test environments quickly and in a reliable manner.

Oracle VirtualBox has enabled me to build testing and development environments which we could not have otherwise built.

From the host side, the Oracle VirtualBox could use more automation.

I have used Oracle VirtualBox for two years now.

We have not had any deployment issues so far.

There have been no issues with the stability.

It has been able to scale for our needs without issue.

The documentation for technical support is excellent.

I chose Oracle VirtualBox because it is easily available, free, and open source. It is also the industry standard for web development virtualization software.

Initially, the setup was straightforward with the exception of setting up the network. Documentation helped me to solve the problems though.

I implemented the solution using a vendor team. Make sure to reserve enough space for the virtual hard drive and make sure to set up the network settings correctly.

Our Return on Investment has been excellent.

Oracle VirtualBox is free.

If you are running multiple virtual machines at the same time, please make sure you have enough resources to do this.

Automatic mirroring/backup using snapshots on the runtime can minimize the number of fail-recovery procedures and down time overall. Running Virtualboxes with individual stacks clarifies use cases and minimizes risk while users test different partial solution elements. 

Virtualboxes can also run in different physical machines so that the relative demand of processing power can be met while maintaining optimal usage of each physical machine. This ensure that the risk of overloads is minimized during peak demand times.

It's helped us utilize spare capacity on servers and test new platforms and frameworks. It has also improved the staging of our apps before implementations.

Managing virtual machine stacks on an individual and stacked basis needs work. It also lacks the ability to perform auto-recovery switchover.

Moreover, they should define Virtualbox stacks as groups of virtual machines working together as solutions. It would also help if they could define auto-backup/mirroring and failover configurations.

I am still evaluating the methodologies with the current free versions.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

We've had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

I set it up myself and tried to configure it to the extent of my knowledge.