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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

I got dinged hard for asking why all the VMWare cusomters don't go to say, VirtualBox.

What I ended up learning from that wasn't necessarily that VMWare products are good, which I will take the indignant replies and downvotes that they are, I don't have them, but that Broadcom's forthcoming price hikes were going to be accepted by their rabid fanbase with grumbles but bigger checks.

What's weird is that, even with AWS, what does practically every large company have as a sub-business? Accountants? Check. Marketing? CHeck.

Oh, and datacenters. Lots of them. Why hasn't industry gotten together to ... ah, nevermind. I know how this ends.

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Vmware products are quite good at scale and support enterprise features that a casual user won't need/cant use.

Virtualbox is designed to be ran on a machine that is already running a desktop OS. It is designed to extend a machine. This is great for a developer.

Vmware/ESXI is a bare metal hypervisor that IS the OS.It effectively partitions a computer hardware and is incredibly stable/secure. This also allows it to do fancy powerful network and storage features directly that an app inside windows/linux/mac can't do.

LoB apps are certified & supported on vmware products. Like the payroll systems you get paid with? If it's running on virtualbox and it does something weird, you're probably not getting paid that week. If it's on Vmware, you better believe you can call people to have it solved asap.

> VMWare cusomters don't go to say, VirtualBox.

from Bad to Worse

VirtualBox is owned by Oracle. If your motivation for switching vendors is getting screwed over by the old vendor, Oracle is the last place you want to go to.

Virtual Box, is good for those that don't want to pay for stuff on local computers.

It doesn't do the performance of VMWare, nor can be used as cloud hypervisor.

> Virtual Box, is good for those that don't want to pay for stuff on local computers.

Be careful using it in corporate environments.

I used VirtualBox at home regularly - old games that won't run on modern operating systems anymore. Being free, it worked reasonably well for that.

At work I had to troubleshoot an issue with some software I couldn't side load on my usual machine as the installer complained of a newer version also installed, removing the newer version would've taken a long time and broke some of my existing projects. So I quickly installed VirtualBox, being 'free', to virtualise another copy of Windows for troubleshooting.

Long story short something else came up, I couldn't get to the troubleshooting stuff so I never got around to setting up a virtual machine after installing VirtualBox.

About a week later I got an email from one of our sysadmins asking whether I was still using VirtualBox. Querying why (out of curiosity, explaining my situation), apparently Oracle reached out, sniffing round for licensing fees, because they noticed I downloaded VirtualBox from their website. I didn't fill out any forms or gave Oracle my details. Work, I'm 95% sure, doesn't use Oracle products at all.

I promptly removed VirtualBox after that. On my personal machine too.

I seldom use stuff on work computers that hasn't been IT approved, or demanded by customer in written form.

Doing otherwise is the kind of stuff that breaks security guidelines and a possible reason to get someone fired.

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