VirtualBox or VMware or Hyper-V?

[youself]

Comparing VirtualBox to VMware and Hyper-V

[Mira Yurizaki]

Most of my VMM experience is with VirtualBox. I've technically used Hyper-V based VMs but this was through Virtual PC. I haven't touched VMWare in any form because I don't feel like I need to.

 

But anyway, I still use VirtualBox because when Guest Additions are installed, I'd argue that if I wasn't seriously looking it's as good as running it natively. Plus it can emulate a decent video card:

[Oshino Shinobu]

I've never used VirtualBox so I can't say much in that regard. 

 

I personally use HyperV at home for my set up and at work I use VMWare on a daily basis. 

 

Of the two, I'd say VMWare is the better option. From my experience, it's faster to perform most actions on a VM compared to HyperV. That said, if you learn HyperV PowerShell cmdlets, you can fly through HyperV setups and actions. 

 

From what I've seen in a professional environment, VMWare is by far the most common. We have Vcenters managing multiple ESXi hosts and thousands of VMs. It scales much better than HyperV when you've got so many VMs. 

 

That said, for personal projects, home server environments or a small business, HyperV should do just fine. You can do pretty much everything that VMWare can do, just the layout and process for it is slightly different. I'm sure VirtualBox is in the same situation. 

 

Perhaps download a Windows Server evaluation and spin up some VMs to see how you like HyperV?

[WereCatf]

What? No love for qemu/+kvm? BLASPHEMY!

[GoodBytes]

It depends on what you are doing. Each VM has their strength and weaknesses. They all have a strength in certain OS. Hyper-V is great running Windows, so-so Ubuntu. VirtualBox plays well with most popular Linux distros. Hyper-V allows lower hardware level access than Virtual Box, so you have higher performance with Hyper-V than VirtualBox. However, VirtualBox has support  for GPU 3D acceleration, while Hyper-V it is pretty limited. Hyper-V can be left unattended, meaning, if you shutdown your PC, Hyper-V will detect that and pause all your VMs running on the back, and will resume them once your system is back up, something you can't do with Virtual Box.

 

So, between the 2, and just these 2, you can see how you have strengths and weaknesses. They are more, this is just a sample.

So there is no, "What is the best". They are all "the best", and all "the worst", you have different tool, which excels at different tasks, depending on your needs and priorities.

[Crunchy Dragon]

-Moved to Programs, Apps, and Websites-