I guess both of them do same thing. Which is one is better?
By "better" I mean stability, resource usage, overall performance etc.
AFAIK, Oracle Virtual Box is totally free but VMWare has several versions including free one.
I'm only interested in free version.
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What do you intend using it for? Virtualising servers or using it on a workstation to use other operating systems. If you're virtualising servers are you looking at bare metal virtualisation or a hosted solution?
VMware is obviously the market leader having started it all. The only free products now are the Viewer (probably no use to you) or ESXi. The latter is a bare metal hypervisor and unless you want to mess around with injecting drivers into the install ISO, you need to run it on hardware that is compatible from the offset. So you need your host server to have compatible network cards, storage controllers, etc. And if you intend running any 64-bit operating systems on it then you need to have VT-x (Intel) or AMD-V enabled. To do I/O pass through to connect devices directly to a VM you would also need VT-d.
I use both VMware Workstation and Fusion. Workstation lets you do more with the emulation of network segments, packet loss, bandwidth throttling etc. Works well. But with modern operating systems tending to need lots of RAM then your host machine needs quite a bit too. ESXi of course support memory ballooning and overcommitting etc. to make better use of resources.
If you let us a bit more of what you're looking at then one of us might be able to offer some advice.
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Yeah, the answer is, as RTJ says, in the Why? & What for?
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We use the free VMplayer at work to run linux (Ubuntu and CentOS) under Windows (XP and 7). Seems to work well.
The main advantage of VMplayer over Virtual Box, based on the last time I played with VB (which was a year or 2 ago), is the VMware Tools. These automatically resize the (guest) linux desktop to fit the (host) VMplayer window, so the linux menu bar is always located at the top/bottom of the window, even if the window is small; no scroll bars required.
If VB also has this facility then VMplayer's advantage for me would be less clear cut.
EDIT: we have development tools which only run under linux, don't do anything networky
Last edited by: Focus on Mon 23 Jul 12 at 11:57
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I want to test bootleg copies of various software so that if something goes wrong, my main OS is not compromised.
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But if the requirement for movilogo is to install an operating system into a VM himself then VMware Player is of no use. You cannot create VMs - you can only run them. The fact he's not said he has an existing VM he wants to run suggests using VMware Player is not what he needed. Otherwise he wouldn't be asking about VirtualBox.
If the requirement is to install/play with/use other OS on say a Windows machine, e.g. a Linux variant, then I'd personally recommend Workstation but it's not cheap. On a Mac Fusion is a lot cheaper than Workstation is for Windows but it lacks some of the features.
It's a shame VMware dropped their free VMware Server product to be honest. That was free and would do all the OP wants. But they dropped that but you can use VMware vSphere ESXi for free but that is a bare metal supervisor and there is no GUI on the machine on which it runs. You manage it from the VMware vClient. I think that route is more complicated than movilogo wants. But I'm only guessing.
To be honest if VirtualBox is (a) free and (b) does the job, then why not try it.
If this is a more complicated requirement for hosting VMs for real workloads then there are a lot of other considerations too.
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So you're wanting to say install an illegal copy of Windows 7 to look at? Or at least illegal copies of applications on a hosted VM - which presumably is Windows based.
And from that I assume you want to have a virtual copy of say Windows running in a window on your existing machine? And that machine is Windows based? If that is correct then the options are VMware Workstation 8 or VirtualBox. I've not looked at the latter.
Of course you could always get an illegal copy of VWware Workstation 8 to try ;-) Actually there's a 30 day free evaluation of that too. After which time you need to enter a valid licence key.
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>> But if the requirement for movilogo is to install an operating system into a VM
>> himself then VMware Player is of no use. You cannot create VMs - you can
>> only run them.
Not sure I understand - I can download a linux .iso and create a VM from that using the 'Create New a Virtual Machine' option.
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>> 'Create New a Virtual Machine' option
Err... or words to that effect :)
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While posting, I have now downloaded and installed Virtual Box on Vista and installed Windows 7 on it. It is running fine (the process is simpler than I thought it to be :-))
Only thing that bugging me is that Virtual Box does not make use of my full screen. Couldn't find any setting to configure that!
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>> Only thing that bugging me is that Virtual Box does not make use of my
>> full screen. Couldn't find any setting to configure that!
See comments above about VWware Tools.
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VirtualBox should be able to run full screen for sure. There will also be add-ons similar to VMware tools which you might like to install.
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>> There will also be add-ons similar to VMware tools which you might like to install.
'Guest Additions' www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html
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Given that VB clearly does support window resizing I'll have to give it another go some time, see if our dev tools run any faster compared to VMplayer.
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When I last used VMware Player you certainly couldn't run through an install of Windows for example. But this was some time ago.
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I have now installed the Guest Addition and now I can use it full screen.
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Do report back. I have VMware (albeit an older version) on Windows and Fusion on Mac. I might take a look. But I also might runs ESXi on my rebuilt desktop as that will support more VMs.
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Virutal Box vs VMWare - rtj70
