VMware workstation and Sun VirtualBox are good desktop virtualization software to try at home or office for testing purpose. Both products have good and bad features, and most of the users started migrating to VirtualBox from VMware workstation. Even, I moved some virtual machines, but I didn’t leave VMware completely. Is VMware workstation better than VirtualBox? Why still I’m using it?
This is follow up post to earlier post 8 advantages of Sun VirtualBox than VMware workstation. When I took my earlier post to VirtualBox community, it faced nice comments and arguments. You can check them here. As I promised earlier, this post indicates basic advantages of VMware workstation than VirtualBox.
Why still I’m using VMware Workstation? Here are the reasons.
1) Trust and Confident.
VMware is the leader in virtualization world. They have famous virtualization products and good experience than anyone in current industry. It makes me confident to use VMware products and I have trust on their products which was working for long time.
2) It’s yours, you paid for it.
Always paid products better than free products, I feel. You paid your valuable money and purchased a good product. It’s yours. You have a provider to listen you, because you purchased it from them.
3) Support.
You can’t go to anybody when open source software started troubling you. But, paid product has a value and supporting system for you. I never asked support from VMware, but the people asked support from VMware and Sun (now Oracle) have good opinion on VMware about their supporting system. Open Source completely depends on community.
4) Other Products and Third party Support.
VMware has several products to support their each product. Working with VMware workstation gives some basic experience on their production line products. Also, there are some third party software support VMware workstation and other VMware products well. Because of still VirtualBox is new, third party support is quite low.
For example, when VirtualBox P2V is complicated, VMware has built in tool for P2V which is a good advantage.
You can find how to do VirtualBox P2V here.
5) Excellent Cloning Option.
VirtualBox is lacking with cloning option. I like to have multiple virtual machines on my desktop virtualization software, so VMware cloning allows me to create virtual machines within 10 seconds, which saves lot of my time and disk space. Linked clone is one of the cool features I like in VMware workstation.
Find out more information about Linked clone here.
Still, VirtualBox cloning is possible by this method.
6) Additional Features and Options
Disk options, network options, 64 Bit and hardware virtualization support, Windows Aero, P2V, exporting to VMware Vsphere and some more features which I like in VMware workstation.
What do you say? Are you still using VMware workstation? Do you like it more the VirtualBox? Then, share your comments and reasons.
