32 engineers on Hacker News describe using VirtualBox first-hand: 5 endorse it, 11 regret it, 1 are mixed.
“It shocked the FreeBSD folks that VirtualBox defaults to BIOS firmware in 2025... and it labels UEFI as "experimental".”
regret · personal · lproven · 2026-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Made this mistake w VirtualBox once - never again. I ended up somehow running the proprietary version which “phoned home””
regret · personal · bch · 2025-06-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have used a Virtual Box VM with a Ubuntu guest for years and it has worked great.”
endorse · personal · dsfsaff · 2025-01-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“unlike VirtualBox where on any given day you might be suffering from any combination of 1) VirtualBox kexts not working on the latest version of MacOS”
regret · production · ranger207 · 2023-08-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It does not scale well at all. Its scripting API is terrible, we ran into endless network problems”
regret · production · roblabla · 2023-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“tested internally by some friends and me using my own dual monitor system and virtualbox (best multi-monitor emulation afaik)”
endorse · personal · lgl · 2022-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using VirtualBox nearly every day at work for the past 4 years, and my experience is that if anything, it's improved in quality”
endorse · production · 4 yr · selfhoster11 · 2020-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had a lot of issues with VirtualBox and networking (I could never SSH into a VM from the host working”
regret · personal · hermitdev · 2019-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it looks like it's time to set a policy of no one using it.”
regret · production · lambda · 2018-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Virtualbox has shared folders, but their performance is pretty lousy and they have issues with relative symlinks.”
regret · production · scrollaway · 2017-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated totally away from Vagrant after struggling with Virtualbox bugs”
regret · production · jitl · 2017-09-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The whole reason we migrated to VMware, about 3 years ago, was that we were using Virtualbox and being really bothered by the issues with it”
regret · production · atombender · 2017-04-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run into issues regarding VB memory consumption crashing machines. Minimum 8gb ram machine.”
regret · production · merrickread · 2016-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Virtualbox, which has its own issues (the client machines can't always see the virtual monitor's resolution), but has been adequate.”
mixed · personal · randallsquared · 2012-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the read/write speed on the VM is pretty atrocious”
regret · production · pavel_lishin · 2011-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Using VM's had been the biggest boost - I can shag around with the various OS's”
endorse · production · 1point2 · 2011-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched from ESXi to VirtualBox this year and liked it better already”
endorse · production · Spyplane · 2011-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use VirtualBox to simulate EC2 locally: a Python class encapsulates the API to start the VMs”
neutral · production · pmontra · 2025-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated from Vagrant/VirtualBox to Multipass and Mutagen.io for file sync. The only thing I miss is the private networking options of VirtualBox.”
neutral · production · jweir · 2023-03-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I switched seamlessly between VirtualBox based and Docker Machine based clusters in no time”
neutral · personal · gofreddygo · 2022-05-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I bought a NAS, but it died out of warranty so I switched to using their software within Virtual Box.”
neutral · production · benologist · 2019-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use VBox to virtualize Windows hosts with hardware acceleration if possible.”
neutral · personal · bayindirh · 2018-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run on Vbox under Mac OS X.”
neutral · production · epalmer · 2017-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run VirtualBox with a stock Ubuntu 14.04 image with docker installed from the docker-hosted deb repo.”
neutral · production · zrail · 2014-10-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run some Virtualbox builds on them which AWS doesn't support.”
neutral · production · rb2k_ · 2013-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This worked by running Virtual box in a headless mode”
neutral · production · dekz · 2013-06-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the other is xmonad and emacs on Arch Linux on VirtualBox.”
neutral · personal · rcb · 2012-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I do all my dev work in Virtualbox or KVM vms.”
neutral · personal · rednaught · 2011-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use VMware and VirtualBox to keep versioned installs of operating systems and toolchains.”
neutral · production · mrmekon · 2011-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“installed the VirtualBox package and (after massaging it a little bit) got it running a Windows 7 environment”
neutral · personal · thaumaturgy · 2011-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I switched to VirtualBox and ever since, I have been struggling to maintain a resolution of 1650x1080 on Ubuntu”
neutral · personal · zohebv · 2010-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“No good for many scenarios, but we use it at work under this clause.”
neutral · production · omh · 2010-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?