VMWare is a virtualisation platform developed by a small group of Berkeley University students. It has been freely available for personal use since version 1. Virtualbox is a virtualisation platform developed by the German company InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH. 

By the peculiarities of history, Virtualbox was acquired by Sun and then Oracle, neither of which are notably philanthropic companies, but it is stlll licenced under the GNU open source licence.

VMWare remains free for personal use up to and including the professional workstation version 17. However, actually finding, downloading and activating version 17 for personal use is somewhat challenging since Broadcomm acquired VMWare for $61 billion. It seems that many smaller commercial customers face similar difficulties in spite of having paid for both software and support.

I feel rather sad about VMWare. I've used it since version 1 when it wasn't certain that it was going to be free for personal use. The developers have maintained it as a consistently clean and straightforward product which probably contributed to its huge commercial success. Up until today when I tried to get V17 I never felt like anything less than a first class customer inspite of never paying a penny. Shame really.

I hope Virtualbox is as good.

Proxmox is what the cool kids (me) use these days.

So I hear. To be fair, the management history of VMWare over the last 10-15 years looks more like something from the Sunday Sport than Computer Weekly, but they've still got a foothold in more mega-corporations, fortune 500 companies, and National governments than makes any sense. I have a feeling that Broadcomm are going to cause problems for people way beyond little users like me. (I haven't posted anything about their changes in charging yet).

I've been using Virtualbox for many years, using it now to run Win7 -- an instance I've been using for many years in several different environments, including Macs (I first spun it up ~10-years ago). Virtualbox is a fantastic product, very flexible, very easy to use. I'm sure there are ways to push it to the breaking point, and Peter knows what they are.  :-{)

I haven't used VirtualBox in a long time. I think I vaguely remember there was something that didn't work because Oracle, but can't remember what/when.

I use Qemu now.

I got a bit annoyed that Broadcomm are saying that the full V17 of VMWare Workstation Pro plus VMWare player are free for personal use when it's next to impossible to actually get it. So, I went to a third party site (Techspot.com) and after fighting off all the "Download Now" buttons that turn out to be dodgy PDF editors or rebadged versions of 7zip, I actually got a copy. Installed, activated (didn't even have to register with Broadcomm) and updated it. Works fine. 

After delving into this a bit, I learned that VirtualBox is best for desktop virtualization, and vmware for servers, which isn't something I've tried (or needed). At work I used a stack of really old, underpowered office pcs for web servers, and a slightly newer and less underpowered, gerry-built pc to run a php front end to a NAS appliance. So if a thing failed, I only had to replace that one thing (the first NAS backplane died, the only thing to fail in >10 years). Still no idea how those goddamn hdds kept on going.

They do though. A few years back we had a patch room next to our office and in one corner was this really ancient tower case. We took the side off once and it was something like a pentium DX4. Then someone suggested turning it off to see what happened. Before anybody could object one brave soul pulled it's kettle lead out. Later that day, a bloke wandered up to ask what had happened to his database. Apparently it was something to do with reporting for a national tax system. It had been running 24x7 for the last 11 years. It all recovered fine and it's probably still going.

Edit: I mean a 486 DX4 of course. Actually can't remember, might have been something else, but it was very old and very dusty.

Yeah I don't have much call for VMs these days but if I do I use Qemu. (And virt-manager for ... managing them).

I installed Qt-based AQemu for management, then discovered the best man page you've ever seen... :/

:D

I mean... it's accurate!

I'm still on VMWare Workstation - it's definitely findable, I only got the latest version a few weeks ago.

This is something that's actually improved, because I had to buy it before. 

Yeah, me too. It seems they forgot that they are a major international company for a few weeks. If they have good intentions then it's sadly masked by poor execution. I went to a third party file download site, grabbed a copy and everything worked fine after that.