Oracle VirtualBox Reviews & Insights

VirtualBox is the tool we use to generate virtual machines in development environments. Either as much as to run Windows or Linux from Mac OS, or Windows from Linux. We have the need to have computers with the possibility of running these operating systems since the programs that we use for the industry are not all multiplatform.

VirtualBox is an excellent option when it comes to virtualizing an operating system in an easy and safe way. Add controls on how much hardware of the host machine is going to be dedicated to the virtual one, configure which ports are accessible from each one, etc. However, like any virtual machine, if you need to use many of the hardware resources for the virtual machine, it is recommended to use a native installation of the virtual machine, since the performance of both (host and virtual) can be affected considerably.

Oracle VM VirtualBox is being used across the development department, mostly to run training environments. This helps us prepare preconfigured VMs with all the tools our engineers need to complete their training at different levels throughout their careers. Providing these training environments was always a challenge before, and after trying cloud options to provide online instances of the training environment, we decided to create these VMs and give offline options on a as-needed basis for our employees and avoid costs from having a growing cloud server capacity.

The most common scenarios for me where Oracle VM VirtualBox is well suited are when you want to create reusable resources and shared them on VMs for many users as a standalone solution and when you want to try things between different operating systems, you can opt for a VM to test things out without affecting the host system.

VirtualBox is being used on an as-needed basis by engineers throughout the organization. The most common use-case is developers using Linux but needing some Windows features (such as Microsoft Teams, which isn't supported on Linux with govcloud). It can also be used in the case where software is being developed that's multi-platform. In this case, VirtualBox's capability of sharing file systems between the host and VM allows for easy compilation on multiple platforms, writing code on the host machine and having those changes instantly reflected in the virtual machine via file sharing.

It's great for personal use, effectively allowing a user to have "N operating systems on 1 box," but isn't appropriate for situations where the process of provisioning and configuring a new machine will happen repeatedly. For this, puppet, docker, or similar would be more appropriate. Another potential workflow would be where a user is only working with one operating system at a time, and changes between them are infrequent. For this, a boot manager such as grub would be more appropriate.

We use Oracle VM VirtualBox to run several virtual machines built with different operating systems. For example, we have legacy software that requires Windows XP to run. For this we have a Windows XP virtual machine that we run through Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Well suited for any virtual machine that does not require use of legacy LPT port.

Oracle VirtualBox is a great addition to my organization's software collection, as it gives us the ability to make use of other software available, such as Genie Motion, by running them directly on the virtual environment. It is so simple to do this using VirtualBox, as the user interface gives the user the ability to change most of the parameters involved.

Oracle VM is well situated in a scenario where one wants to evaluate an operating system before buying it. It is a great way to use other software without necessarily installing them to the host machine, and also very useful in events where the users computer has minimal resources such as little memory

We currently use VirtualBox to deploy our testing VMs. As our primary developer on our installer, we support over 5 operating systems. Each of those OSs can have different flavors and versions we support as well. We use VirtualBox to locally store multiple VMs that will be booted up to be tested on.

Virtual Box (VB) is perfect for someone who just needs to spin up a VM, do some testing, and then shut it off. I wouldn't recommend VB for a VM that would need to be stable over a long period of time.

We use VirtualBox primarily in our department. It allows us to quickly develop and test in various standardized environments on our own PCs. Testing is the primary use case - whether testing a back-end application before deploying to a live server or testing front-end applications with a variety of operating systems and browsers.

VirtualBox is well-suited for a super user or generally, anyone that is comfortable searching, learning, and experimenting. There's a large variety of applications for virtualization on desktop, and VirtualBox is well suited for all with the right configuration and potentially additional third-party tools. Users looking for a one-click out of the box solution may or may not be satisfied with VirtualBox - with the right documentation and/or starter box, it can be very accessible.

We use Oracle VM VirtualBox quite extensively at our company to virtualize software. The main use case that we have is for our software engineers. Our engineering team has a single approved developer virtual machine that all of us use. It makes developer support and the replication of problems much easier knowing we are all on identical environments. Also for new hires it makes getting their environments set up a quick and easy process. Other departments use it to run Windows or Linux applications on their Macs.