It seems like VBox would be hard pressed to be more than an also-ran in that market. I'm no virtualization expert, but frankly it seems to me that it would be sort of silly doing the latter - data-center virtualization has come a long way since Virtualbox was created - hypervisors, large-scale maintenance, etc. Honestly at this point is seems like the VirtualBox team has two options - accept that it's mature software in it's niche, and just needs a bit of maintenance here and there to fix the occasional bug and maintain compatibility with evolving OSes, or jump off the deep end and try to compete with VMWare, etc. hell at least since the days when emulating C64s and Apple 68000s on the PC was cutting edge. Just migrated a friend's XP system to MS VirtualPC and discovered you can't even mount a folder as a virtual drive - a basic integration feature in most every virtualization/emulation program since. Occasionally I'll encounter some OS that won't run in it (seems like recently the Mint live CD wouldn't get past th Grub stage, or maybe it was Xubuntu), but by and large it's far more convenient than many of the alternatives. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I've gotten the sense that Virtualbox is targeted more at the personal / local user, and is fairly mature in it's niche. The big features for me are the OpenGL and cross-platform support. At least not without a lot of work to host those VMs directly on VirtualBox and not looking or working at all like they would when they hit production. to pick a bunch of essential pieces from recent memory. So it's kinda getting to a point of having a large and growing number of server apps that you won't be able to use VirtualBox to set up a local development and test environment for things that involve, say, using a Stackato PAAS, or a FEO appliance, or an Apigee API gateway appliance, etc. Unfortunately, a lot of app footprints are starting to rely on deploying other "appliance VMs" in your VM (yo dawg), and VirtualBox is still straggling behind the others on implementing some form of nested VM capability. A lot of DevOps types are trying to use VirtualBox to build disposable test clusters for their applications, and has been the default and one of the best supported engines for vagrant. It's also pretty heavily used for development and test of server deploys.
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February 2023
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