So ... for the corp/academic crowd, what is it VMWare does that VirtualBox doesn't do?
I don't understand orgs that deal with companies with a loooooonnnnnngggggg history of predatory pricing and sales shenanigans and not have active mitigation plans.
Who has Oracle that isn't actively planning going to Postgres or MariaDB? Of course I'd say the same thing for IBM in the 1970s, Microsoft in the 1990s, and AWS today.
First, VirtualBox is an Oracle product, so I'm not sure which side you're advocating :)
More to the point, I think VirtualBox is the equivalent, broadly, of VMWare Workstation/VMWare Player; which is a specific individual product that runs on desktop as type 2 hypervisor and a teeny tiny bit of the broader VMWare ecosystem (probably neglible part of their revenue).
I don't know if VirtualBox has any product or share in server/datacentre space? Whereas, VMware is absolutely positively huge. The core ESXi product, sure; but again the ecosystem around it, from vSPhere/vCenter to vRealize and Orchestrator and nsx and vSan and everything else, the management and automation flows are pretty well integrated (externally; I'm sure it's a acquired/developed mess internally as every other IT product ever:).
It's a bit like... I don't know, "what does Window Explorer have that File Commander doesn't"? It's a valid question that has a rational answer which is useful for limited use cases, but it misses the very very big forest (Windows and Office and Azure etc) for very minor trees inside of it
VirutalBox is a barebones type 2 hypervisor with only basic orchestration, backup, networking, management features, if any.
ESXi and the VMWare products built on top of it (vCenter/vSphere) are not even comparable to VB, other than that they both can run virtual machines. vSphere can move running VMs between storage or compute hosts without interruption, can failover between storage or compute, can failover between networking outages (thanks to virtual switches and the ecosystem of hardware support around it), and provides a platform for additional third party add ons for automated backups and recovery. Not to mention easy role based SSO access. My entire university's infrastructure was virtualized on VMWare aside from a few domain controllers and the Netapp storage clusters it all ran on, and the equally large Linux/KVM infrastructure and the HPC datacenter that ran a bunch of other stuff for...reasons (higher ed is fun). And as an added bonus, desktop type 2 hypervisors like Workstation or Fusion integrate perfectly into it. I used to manage a dozen Windows and Linux VMs straight from VMWare Fusion on my Mac and still do at home in my little VMUG cluster.
It's like comparing a Chevy Spark to an aircraft carrier, except you built an entire medium to large sized organization's infrastructure on top of it. You can't just switch overnight unless you want to stop making money for a while. For most orgs who can justify the already steep price, moving away from VMWare onto something else will mean multiple years long projects requiring thousands of person-hours to complete, redundant efforts (as the old stuff can't just go away until the new stuff is battle tested), on top of probable hardware purchases since VMWare and its demands have shaped on-site datacenter spend, layout, and networking for years.
The actual VMs are the easiest part to move since they are just some virtual disks and a config file. It's all the other supporting stuff and high availability that need to configured and battle tested that will take forever. It's not something you can plan to do ahead of needing to do it because doing so would mean doing the same job twice for years for a bet that you can't just weather some higher costs for a year or two before you can move stuff onto cheaper platforms (and train/hire for expertise).
> what is it VMWare does that VirtualBox doesn't do?
For my specific use case, it's display responsiveness.
My main work machine is a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 3. Our development environment is Ubuntu, so when I got the machine our IT guy had helpfully installed Ubuntu on it.
There were two major problems though. I could only get my AirPods to pair as headphones, not as a full headset with microphone. And worse, I couldn't get my triple-monitor setup to work at all. (The ThinkPad has a 15" 4K display, and I use two 24" 4K displays with it: one in landscape mode immediately above the ThinkPad display, another in portrait mode to the left.) I could only get two displays out of the three to come up.
I did like the hardware quite a lot - I've been a huge ThinkPad fan for 25 years. So I immediately bought a similar machine for personal use. It came with Windows, and both of the above items worked "out of the box".
So I looked at the bottom of the work machine and saw that it came with a Windows license. I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Lenovo and installed Windows on it, figuring I would run Ubuntu in a VM.
I tried VirtualBox first, and it worked, but the display wasn't smooth. For example, I often use the Windows key + left/right arrow to move a window to one side of the display or the other. Ubuntu does a "sliding" animation when you do this, but it looked like it was only refreshing the display every tenth of a second or so.
So I tried VMware and it was perfect. The display is just about as responsive as running Ubuntu on the bare metal - every transition and animation is perfectly smooth.
VMware Workstation has much better USB support (especially USB NIC support) than VirtualBox.
It's also licensable individually. If you want to use the VirtualBox Extension Pack in a business environment, you need to buy a per-user license. It's only $40, but Oracle has a minimum order quantity of 100, so you're spending at least $4000.[1] i.e. in a business, for about 20-30 users, VMware Workstation is cheaper.
VirtualBox just straight up isn't reliable enough for any production situation. You never know how it'll break, and the support front release to release is unpredictable and overall sucks Cindy Stankey balls.
I don't understand orgs that deal with companies with a loooooonnnnnngggggg history of predatory pricing and sales shenanigans and not have active mitigation plans.
Who has Oracle that isn't actively planning going to Postgres or MariaDB? Of course I'd say the same thing for IBM in the 1970s, Microsoft in the 1990s, and AWS today.
VMWare obviously has a lot of the same.