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Given that Oracle seems to have the midas shit touch (RIP John Dunsworth), does anyone have suggestions on Virtualbox alternatives? VMWare is the obvious one I guess.

It's great that they have released 5.2 and that they are adding new things. Virtualbox is a handy tool for me and I'm just afraid one day soon Oracle will turn it to shit.

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It's been an Oracle product for 8 years, I wonder why you chose this particular release to think about searching for alternatives. Maybe you just wanted to pay tribute to John Dunsworth.

Oracle just killed Solaris and put JavaEE out to the Eclipse Foundation's hospice. They have been accelerating the purge of Sun Microsystems tech in recent months.

Doesn't Java being under an oss foundation make it safer?

JavaEE and Java are two completely different things. I don't know if too many people are shedding actual tears over JavaEE, but divesting from its management does indicate that Oracle plans to commit fewer resources to improving the standard and the reference implementations.

Use apps that use your native OS virtualization (Hyper-V, KVM, Docker for Mac/xhyve, etc). Bonus: Less driver crashes, better security and peaceful coexistence of different virtualization apps.

> peaceful coexistence of different virtualization apps

Not sure how this works elsewhere but in Windows land I've only ever been able to get one hypervisor per reboot.

I was thinking of Docker for Windows and the stock Hyper-V VM UI.

Let’s be honest, it never was a great product, but the “price was right” compared to commercial alternatives on macOS (Aka VMware and Parallels). With the existence of virtualization natively in the OS (leveraged by xhyve and friends), there’s virtually no reason to use Virtualbox anymore for me (yes, I know that’s not the case for everyone).

The only offering I've seen close to parallels level of functionality is Veertu, which is a seemingly abandoned product since they released their CI tool Anka.

When I last tested it, Veertu wasn't reliable enough to suggest even as a $0 option.

On Linux, I've been using kvm with libvirt and virt-manager as the GUI.

+1 to this. KVM and virt-manager Just Work for me on Debian 9. I don't know what I was doing wrong with previous releases but I just installed it, added my user to the correct group, and there I go.

Have you gotten Windows to work well as a guest?

I could never get it to work as well as it does with VirtualBox.

I don't know about working as well as it does in VirtualBox, but with the QXL guest driver to do screen resizing and clipboard sharing, it's not too bad.

I am a huge VMware fan and have been for a long time.

Caution: I have found mentioning this confuses people because I'm often mistaken for a FOSS zealot. I am not. I just prefer FOSS because I like to tinker. I have no moral qualms with closed source.

So, if you do decide to go VMware, you may get odd questions if you mention it. That has actually been the most difficult thing about using it. They are well supported and feature rich. I've been paying them for years.

qemu is the best virtualization tool in my opinion.

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