VMware and VirtualBox

Virtual box
literally because it just werks
When using a VM I don't want to be doing extra faffing around then i have to

I use virtualbox. Why? I don't know, it's the first one I started using. I have a few images that I need to keep using too, some made by others. Can you transfer images between vmware and virtualbox? Why would you use one over the other?

VMware generally has the better UI

couldnt*

>Is there even a difference between VMware and VirtualBox anymore?
This is a dumb question. VMware is not a better version of Virtualbox. VMware solves entirely different use cases.

For example, VMware monitors hardware health of the host, and can notify you if any sensors go out of range. This is totally useless for you running Linux inside Windows, but critical for a VM server in a datacenter that you only visit in person maybe once a year.

VMware does high availabilty, backups, it has a web management UI, etc. None of these things are useful to you. For your purposes, VMware is not better, it is unnecessarily complex.

On the flip side, if you need to host hundreds of VMs on multiple geographically diverse hosts, Virtualbox doesn't have the tools you need to manage such a complex setup.

There are also VMware Player and VMware Workstation, which have a very similar feature set to VirtualBox. Those are probably what OP was asking about.

Thos a stupid OP. He doesn't know the difference between the types of hyper visor. Hint you use VMWare if you've got an actual job, and you need to run vms from a type1 esxi install onto your daily driver PC for testing or whatever.

You use virtual box if you're a student or just want to try a new distro. Virtual box can't run esxi or hyper-v vms

>Virtual box can't run esxi or hyper-v vms
What did he mean by this?

A Dell r610 running ESXi 6.7 with 4 dad's in raid 5. I have a windows domain environment and a Linux lan split between a pfsense vm. Electricity is maybe $20-$25 a month, which isn't bad to have access to half a dozen high powered VM's and fully virtualized home lab environments

I use Virtualbox just because it's packaged in Arch's repos and it serves my use case fine.
I toyed with KVM on virt-manager (libvirt) but sound got fucked without pulseaudio.

VMware Player just works

Immean there's a shit tonne of issues running non vbox vms on vbox. Plenty of them will fail to boot and that's not an easy fix

Why is it trash?

He just thinks type 2 hyper visors are trash because he's elitist. Vbox is fine for small stuff like testing out a new distro and it's really easy to configure. ESXI is not, that's enterprise grade and overly complicated although new versions are getting better. Hyper v is phenomenal though however as soon as you install it you're effectively losing performance on your main rig even when not using another vm.

>as you install it you're effectively losing performance on your main rig even when not using another vm.
why's that?

Hyper v magically (impressively) converts your physical pc into a virtualized one upon installing the hyper v role. It does this transparently so you won't even realise you've virtualized you rock because all your hardware still works like it should. Try that shit on Linux

Because it's been virtualised you'll lose performance. Its not as bad as it used to be but if your gaming then yeah you'll lose frames prob around 20%

Hyper v is slow compare to vmware

All I/O goes through an extra layer of abstraction. Compared to native, a guest OS has a slower tick rate, worse CPU scheduling, and no control over hardware power states.

^ This guy gets it.

Hyper-v and KVM only drop about 1~8% performance in """real world""" scenarios. That's why it's so popular in gaming, where the drop is sometimes even less than a percentile because it's optimum scenario of one single program running in it's own memory space so that the host isn't bogged down with privileged calls the guest *must* wait for.
For both scenarios you should be using Qemu however, if you didn't yet know Qemu can be accelerated by WHPX, the hardware driver windows uses in it's virt stack. Go grab Qemu, it doesn't matter your platform, its a better choice now.

I get you're a windows guy, but use Qemu, It's going to be a different experience using qemu-img, qemu-system and the like but it's way more powerful to just
qemu-img(.exe) convert -c /path/to/vhd.qcow
compress the file; iirc you need to run that every time with windows qemu you want to free up space but fuck the weird hyper restricted tools under both vmware and virtual box - just use qemu and accelerate it with hyperv.

I'd use xen if I cared enough to really dive deep.

Y know what I'll try qemu as that's a compelling argument. Nice to have solid knowledge on /g. Surprised I haven't been called a shill just for pointing out what hyper v does too.

Hypervisor stacks are a whore and a half to get going, it was conflicting as a linux fag when windows brought a very compelling competitor to qemu/kvm to an in-tree subsystem. Really though the benefit is mostly from the fact I can just use the same virtual hard disks I've generated on linux and provide essentially the same virtual machine cross platform - one of the reasons I think people still try to get past using virtbox on linux, but virtual box = it's don't.

No doubt. I do it as a field engineer and it's always windows server2016/2019 and then able hyper v. It's so ridiculously fast and easy and you immediately have a backup and check point system going. None of those.businesses are going to be using discrete graphics in their servers so it's the number one choice and far less expensive than esxi ( and their awful licensing system) but hey I'm up for learning a new way of doing things and as always these days theres gonna be a YouTube tutorial for it.

what's a "non vbox vm" I can take a vmdk and attach it to a vbox vm and boot it just fine, what are you going on about

Use Proxmox if you want a dope Hypervisor.

If it wasn't created in virtual box there's a good chance virtual box can't boot it. Yes the files are going to have a vmdk extension. That does not guarantee cross compatibility. I literally just tried a esxi 5.1 windows small business server 2011 that a got from a client on Friday to move mailboxes off of and lo and behold virtual box fails to boot it. VMware workstation player works just fine. This isn't unusual

Atleast VMWare has a lot more features, plus I can install anything from normal windows 10 to windows 95 beta without getting bitch by.