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Comment by click170 | Hacker News Reader

I switched to VirtualBox a while back when I realized VB was Open Source and VMWare wasn't.

That's not really their marketshare/growth area. The real money is the enterprise stuff, and no one is as slick in there. Having hot swappable VMs running on blades connected to a SAN with real time load balancing is as slick as hell, as well as costing a pretty penny.

Add to that a really slick management console, and there's a reason why they own the space.

I would question their long term (15-20 years) viability. The major part of their enterprise profit is for legacy apps, virtualizing some fox pro database backended windows 2000 box. It's a lot easier to virtualize the thing than reengineer the thing. Sooner or later though, the requirements for all systems go away, and stuff like that will get migrated to some newer system, cloud or otherwise.

The market for straight cloud systems, like s3, is a lot more even.

I really don't think it's just for legacy apps - people install VMWare as the base platform for enterprise data centers - it was a pretty smart move for EMC to acquire them as it makes it a bit of a no-brainer to then have EMC SANs as well which is most of the money typically goes.

But 15 years from now people will need to virtualize Windows 2020.

VirtualBox is a great tool for sure. VMWare does beat VB for large amounts of virtual machines. But that should really not matter to anyone who's not running a datacenter.

In the personal use realm, VB (mostly the guest tools) just isn't very slick compared to VMWare. Dual screens usage, seamless/unity modes, resizing windows, clipboard transfers, drive mounting, etc, are almost always a better experience with VMWare (fusion/workstation). The biggest reason I use VB in many places is because you can't argue with the price.

Vagrant provides a good UX for devs using VMs for web servers IMO.

http://vagrantup.com/

I have a fully-licensed copy of the latest version of VMWare Workstation for OS X and still use VirtualBox with Vagrant.

Last time I tried it, it didn't work. Wasn't really in the mood to filter through many false positives on Google, so I dropped it.

The "UX" of Vagrant fails when it doesn't work on a rather vanilla debian workstation.

Creator of Vagrant here. I'm sorry you had a poor experience.

Get in touch with me at mitchell.hashimoto@gmail.com and I can help you get through any issues you may be having. Not being able to set it up easily is definitely a "bug" in my book!

Looks like my problem was a long-standing but hard to reproduce issue. I lost the repro, but vagrant started working thanks to Mitchell's help.

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