Earlier today, I asked on Twitter:
Is there a reason to stick with VMware Workstation over VirtualBox?—
Kyle Maxwell (@kylemaxwell) February 20, 2012
This led to a lot of good feedback, mostly because I have an awesome community there. For background, I use VMware Workstation at the office (under a Windows host) and VirtualBox at home (under a Linux host). In both cases, I mostly just want isolated operating systems for desktop usage (eg using Linux at work), although I occasionally use them for security research of various sorts.
Some folks liked the idea of moving to VirtualBox. I noted with idealistic and perhaps naïve surprise that nobody mentioned the fact that Oracle offers VirtualBox under a copyleft (GPL) license, although one person noted that he uses it for “price & features”. Others just seem to like it better for non-specific reasons.
Other folks preferred VMware. Some of them just don’t like Oracle – a position I understand and share – but others like the SCSI support, options and performance, or for Visual Studio plugins. Enterprise features and DirectX support also got a mention.
I think my status quo will continue to work well, then. Due to my employer’s use of VMware in the enterprise, I have no problems getting legitimate access to Workstation, even though I don’t need the enterprise-level features. But at home, just for experimentation or segmented desktops, VirtualBox does the job quite well. Even though nothing has changed for me, occasional validation that I haven’t missed something obvious makes me feel better.
I’m pretty fond of VirtualBox, simply because it’s free (price) and does everything I need it too. I’ve only superficially used VMWare Workstation or Fusion and don’t have anything particular against them other than that I’d have to pay for them out of my pocket. One feature I think VMWare products do handle better is snapshots. With VirtualBox, you have to shutdown a VM before restoring a snapshot, whereas VMWare lets you do it from a running VM.
I just switched this past weekend to VirtualBox 4.2. I had been running VMware Workstation 9, and prior to that, version 8.
VMware Workstation has some serious stability issues, regardless of the Host OS.. I tried both Linux and Windows. Had regular lockups after about 8-9 days of uptime.
I now have Centos 6.3 as my host OS and in the past 24 hours, I’ve noticed that VirtualBox performs much better. I run 3 virtuals, all 3 are FreeBSD 9.
At 3am, FreeBSD does its nightly security reporting and emails the reports to me. When running under VMware, the reports would finish up at about 3:20-3:30. On VirtualBox, they finish at 3:05 to 3:08. I’ll find out about stability as time goes on, but I’m betting it will be more reliable.
This is on the same hardware, an AMD Phenom II X6, 12 gigs mem, 750 gig OS drive, and RAID 0 240 gig array for the VMs.
Two thumbs up from me for VirtualBox
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