▷ Virtualbox vs vmware: keys to choose your hypervisor

In this article we are going to face two famous Hypervisors: VirtualBox vs VMware. There are quite a few applications that allow virtualization, but without a doubt two of them are the best known. Which Hypervisor will be above the other?

The virtualization technique allows creating, through software, a virtual or non-physical version of an operating system or also from a hardware platform. When we virtualize, we take the resources that a physical machine would have: CPU, RAM, Hard Drive, Motherboard, Network, and everything that makes up a computer and simulate them using software that in turn is installed within an operating system that operates in a physical machine.

Index of contents

Thanks to virtualization we can have our own operating systems isolated from our physical computer, in this way we can test configurations and experiment without compromising the integrity of our physical operating system.

In addition, we can also share hardware and files from one system to another to work simultaneously with both. For all these reasons it is very important to ensure that the virtual machines have a good performance and are as similar as possible to a real machine.

Presentations and technical characteristics of the machines

The first thing we have to do is the presentations of the applications that we are going to face. Although they hardly need one because they are globally known.

VMware

VMware is without a doubt the leading virtualization platform on the market. The company has been perfecting and expanding its virtualization application package over the years, undoubtedly positioning itself as the leader in this sector. It has applications for all kinds of functions: virtualization of hardware, software, servers, business, home applications and a long etcetera. Almost all of the company's applications have a paid license, although it will allow us to use them as a free trial version for a time.

The version that we are going to test is VMware Workstation Player 15 in its trial version. We have chosen this because it is the cheapest license and the easiest acquisition for the user compared to VirtualBox

VirtualBox

The Oracle proprietary tool is another of the most complete solutions that we can obtain. VirtualBox is available completely free of charge to users, and is primarily geared towards desktop environments for operating system virtualization in non-business environments. Despite this, it is perfectly valid for professional use, since it has many of the functionalities that VMware also has and also for free. The version we have used of this software is 5.2.20.

Although it is true that we will not have the specific applications that VMware does have, for our comparison from the point of view of a desktop user it perfectly fulfills its mission.

VMware Workstation Player Features

VMware Workstation Player is the company's cheapest virtualization software package. The next in the level will be the Pro version that has more advanced features than this version and we will also have it available in a trial version. As for the Player version, we can acquire its license for 166 euros and the Pro version for 275 euros.

Some of the features that VMware Workstation Player has that differentiate it from VirtualBox are:

• We can create virtual machines with compatible operating systems on Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Mac and all of it in different versions. Although for Mac its virtualization is not activated natively.

• We can only start a virtual machine simultaneously in the Player version. In the Pro version we can create and start several of them. Support for the use of shared files between the host system and the virtual system. It has natively USB 3.0 drivers and SD card reader. It implements 3D graphics with DirectX 10 and Open GL compatibility. We can configure a quantity of personalized graphic memory. In addition, it supports screens at 4K resolution

Incorporates support for UEFI booting both normal and secure.

Additional features of the Workstation Pro version

In addition to the additional features with VMware Workstation Pro we can:

• Integrate with ESXi and VMware Sphere for remote and server virtualization Remote control of virtual machines Advanced configuration of virtual networks Ability to take system snapshots to restore the state of the virtual machine as it was before pausing Possibility of booting multiple machines simultaneously

VirtualBox Features

As for the tools and possibilities that this hypervisor offers us and that differentiate it from VMware we highlight:

• The most important of all, is a free license application. It is also a cross-platform tool and we can install Windows, Mac, Linux operating systems natively and without the need for extra activation. It is compatible with VMware virtual machines, so we can run one of them in VirtualBox We can clone a virtual machine as many times as we want

• It has the possibility of starting several virtual machines simultaneously We can also take snapshots of the system and restore the state of the virtual machine before it stops Possibility of encrypting the virtual machines We can capture in video clips what we do in the virtual machine In this case we will have a support for 3D acceleration more imitated than in VMware Support for USB 2.0 and 3.0 is also limited and the installation of a free extension will be necessary.

Common characteristics of both applications

Both programs have a large number of similar characteristics that in one way or another we have cited in their corresponding list in previous sections, however, there are some that, being equal, we must mention as common.

• We will have the possibility to carry out the operations from the command line of the host system. Both applications support Intel VT-x and AMD-v technologies.

• We will have extra tools to improve the performance of virtual systems and the transfer of files and clipboards between the physical and virtual system. Possibility of customizing the hardware components of the virtual machine In both applications we can mount ISO images or physical removable storage devices for the installation of virtual systems We can add different hot input and output devices, as well as audio and video elements. We can configure the network as a bridge to physically interact with our switch or router and in this way connect computers on the network

Performance testing of virtual machines

Virtual and physical machine characteristics

Now we will proceed to cite the technical characteristics of each team for the performance evaluations.

Physical machine:

• VMware Workstation Player 15 build 10134415 VirtualBox 5.2.20 r125813 Intel Core i5 6500 @ 3.2GHz 16GB DDR4 Dual Channel RAM Mechanical Hard Drive SATA 500GB 5400RPM

Virtual machines:

The characteristics of the virtual machines in both programs are practically the same:

• 1 CPU with two dedicated cores 2 GB of RAM 50 GB hard drive Windows 10 Pro x64 Guest additons tools installed on both machines.

Test of performance

We have performed several tests to check the performance of virtual machines when directly taking hardware resources from the physical computer.

The first test we have carried out is to check the performance of the hard disk with CristalDiskMark 5.5 on both the physical and virtual machines.

Physical hard drive

VirtualBox hard drive

VMware hard drive

As we can see the results are quite different, especially with VMware. We know that as it is a mechanical hard disk, the results obtained in VMwre are not indicative in any case, since they come out with the proper performance of an SSD when this is not our case.

This may be because VMware uses some of the RAM on the physical machine to perform virtual file transactions, thereby speeding up the performance of the virtual machine.

For its part, VirtualBox does not implement this solution and shows lower results than what is shown in the benchmark of the real hard disk.

A combined CPU and Hard Drive test has also been performed by compressing a 1.12GB file with 7-Zip. The results have been the following:

And then a test for transferring a 560 MB package over the network:

The following test has been performed with CinebenchR15 for CPU performance:

Finally, a benchmarking of the RAM units in each of the virtual machines has been carried out with Aida64:

We can see that in practically all the results the benefits of the virtual machines have been the same, so we can say that the implementation of the Virtualiza Intel VT-x technology works perfectly in both programs.

conclusion

In this comparison of VirtualBox vs VMware, undoubtedly both applications are very similar in terms of the performance of virtualized machines. We highlight in VMware the use of RAM to accelerate the transactions of the files on your virtual hard drives, although otherwise the results are almost identical.

This shows that VirtualBox has done a great job in its latest versions up to par in performance with VMware, which is more valuable if we consider that it is a free application. On the other hand, we have been able to verify that VMware shows better support for 3D acceleration, so in this sense it exceeds VirtualBox.

As for the range of solutions and tools available, they are very similar, except that the VMware version is a bit more limited than VirtualBox, especially since we cannot run several machines at the same time and in VirtualBox, yes, this may greatly incline the scales towards the free app.

In short, if you want to eventually use a program to test some virtual machines, VirtualBox is recommended as it is free and offers the possibility of multi-starting machines. If, on the other hand, it is a small or medium business environment, it would be worth acquiring VMware Workstation in its Pro version, but in no case the Player version because it is quite limited. Although VirtualBox is also perfectly valid.

This concludes our article on VirtualBox vs VMware, we hope you found it useful.

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You have seen the results, and we have provided you with the main characteristics of each one, it is your turn to decide which one to use