That's not how it works. How many HN stories do you see about jails/zones? How many about Docker?
The ease of use of Docker and the ubiquitousness of Linux make for a disruptive combination.
The 'technically worse, but faster and cheaper' combination Docker offers compared to virtualization is exactly what The innovators dilemma talks about.
I don't doubt that some people use Virtualbox who would otherwise purchase VMWare Workstation or Fusion. Those products have got to be a tiny, tiny sliver of where VMware's revenue comes from, though.
To VMware Fusion/Workstation, which isn't where they make their money anyway. Nobody talks about VirtualBox on the server where KVM is much better supported.
No, because their feature set is similar for many purposes, their stuff works well cross-platform and is free. The way I see it, VMWare was a one trick pony and the horse has bolted, and while expanding their offering in to virtual networking topology provision and serious hardware infrastructure provision has been tried, it inevitably fails in subtle ways.
Simply put: people need transparency in dynamic, modern infrastructure and they don't get it from 'put me in the middle' commercial vendors. Nor does the complexity cost of the mystical one size fits all virtualization solution magically dissipate when marketers invoke the ancient spirits of enterprise requirements.
I'm not aware of many people using VirtualBox for server virtualization. That's where VMWare makes (almost all) of their money.
VirtualBox isn't better in anyway then VMWare - except it is cheaper. That isn't really enough on its own (and there are plenty of more viable competitor of zero cost is all that matters: Xen, KVM, etc etc).
OTOH, Docker is cheaper, faster, much less resource intensive, and less secure. That's disruptive, and much more difficult for VMWare to fight than another conventional virtualization competitor.
You're right of course, however I would posit that VMWare's server popularity is based upon its historical dominance in the workstation space, which is what's under threat. I should have made this clearer. Containers are apples to paravirt's oranges to v8/JVM's dragonfruit.
Yes, and even earlier - before ESX - nobody had thought of server paravirt, and there was only workstation. But these days there are free alternatives that work on all platforms and don't hound you for needless upgrades.
Besides, it feels like the fad around paravirt is over. There's a fair argument that its original server-side popularity was mostly a hack around 'doze's crappy install/config procedure, and 'doze is dying off.
Now we're left with containers, KVM and VirtualBox... the desktop replacement of VMWare workstation being the final nail in the coffin for its dwindling userbase.
VirtualBox would only be a "threat" to Workstation/Fusion. Products like that make up a small part of VMware's revenue. Enterprise is where the money is (products like vSphere, ESX, NSX).
