My experience with this has been painful but ESXi requires that you have a Windows machine to manage the instances via its Windows only client app. I agree, virtualbox is a much better product within enterprise class corps for a small (1 core per vm) model than vmWare ESXi is by far. May 2009, 01:50 Primary OS: Ubuntu 8.10 VBox Version: OSE Debian Guest OSses: Win XP, Ubuntu 8.10 Still praying that VirtualBox will at some point bring out something to counter ESXi olivernz Posts: 7 Joined: 4. This stuff is server grade and only plays nice on very limited hardware (but that is then officially supported).īut for desktop virtualisation there's nothing better than VirtualBox! Read the VMware website carefully to what it does and doesn't do! Be very careful using Desktop PCs for ESXi. You won't be thanked on the long run.but.Īlso be aware that you'll probably spend lots of $$$ for extra products. Don't try and get VirtualBox to work for you. You also have to spend serious ammounts of $$$ for any function above the basic Hypervisor. Don't get me wrong, i hate quite a few functions of ESXi (like Windows only HUD!!!). In a business currounding I'd only use ESXi because there is just no other product around that can get so many servers virtualised so easily with so many functions. That machine cannot be used for anything else.ī) There is extensions to do anything from backing-up to running globally distributed cloud datacentres. There is no GUI on a server running ESXi. It can simulate any OS on any OS, but when running a virtual machine of the KVM architecture, it can provide hardware-level performance, making you forget that you are using a virtual machine, so most users tend to run it on a Linux host.Don't know if this is still current but VirtualBox is the equivalent of VMware Workstation NOT EXS(i).Ī) ESXi is a OS in it's own right.
It is a free executable open source hosted virtual machine manager (VMM) that supports hardware virtualization. The last best free virtual machine I'll recommend is QEMU (Quick Emulator).
In addition, it costs a lot of money to upgrade every year. However, its disadvantage is its high price.
Users can switch between Windows and Mac OS or even use them at the same time without restarting the computer repeatedly.īecause Parallels Desktop focuses on Apple's platform, it provides many features and optimizations that other virtual machine programs do not have. With it, users can easily virtualize Windows, Linux and other operating systems under Mac OS X. Parallels Desktop is the best virtual machine program that runs on Mac computers. In addition, it doesn't support virtualizing as many guest system types as VMware and VirtualBox. With this feature, users can virtualize Windows and Linux systems.Ĭompared to the above two virtual machine programs, Hyper-V's advantage is that its VM runs faster, but its disadvantage is that it can't run multiple guest systems at the same time without interference among them. Hyper-V is a free feature, although it's always related to Windows editions (this means money to some extent). In addition, this feature is also available on Windows Server versions like Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019. This feature is not available in Home Edition.
Hyper-V is a virtualization feature built-in 64-bit Windows 8/10 Pro Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Education Edition. VMware vs VirtualBox, Which Is Better For You 3. But if you are a freshman of virtualization, VirtualBox is recommended. On these host operating systems (32-bit or 64-bit), users can virtualize x86 operating systems, including Solaris, Windows, DOS, Linux, OS/2 Warp, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.Ĭompared to VMware, VirtualBox's advantage is that it is open-source (free), small, and simple, but its disadvantage is that it's not as stable as VMware and it doesn't offer as many features as VMware. VirtualBox is compatible 4 kinds of host operating systems: Windows hosts, OS X hosts, Linux distributions, and Solaris hosts. But it is now developed by Oracle and is part of Oracle's xVM virtualization platform technology.
This virtual machine program was produced by Germany's InnoTek Software Company. Oracle VirtualBox is the best free virtual machine.