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VirtualBox vs Xen
March 12, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
7★
Oracle VirtualBox is a powerful virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction.
9★
Xen Project is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently.
VirtualBox and Xen are both software that let you run an operating system inside another operating system, which is a bit like renting out your house to someone who then rents out the rooms to their friends. They both support Linux and Windows, can take snapshots of their virtual tenants and generally make sure things don’t explode when you try to run five different versions of Windows at once. They also rely on fancy hardware acceleration, which means your computer pretends to be much more powerful than it actually is, while quietly sobbing under the weight of too many virtual machines.
VirtualBox started life in Germany in 2007 and was later adopted by Oracle, which means it now comes with all the love and warmth one expects from a giant corporate overlord. It’s the friendly, easy-going sort of hypervisor, perfect for people who just want to test things without setting up a data center in their basement. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and, crucially, doesn’t ask too many questions before letting you do ridiculous things like booting DOS inside Windows inside Linux inside itself. It’s also a Type 2 hypervisor, which is a fancy way of saying it needs an existing operating system to feel secure before it gets to work.
Xen, on the other hand, was born in the hallowed halls of Cambridge University in 2003, which means it probably wears a tweed jacket and looks down on the likes of VirtualBox. It’s a Type 1 hypervisor, meaning it doesn’t need an operating system to hold its hand—it just takes over the hardware directly, like a true conqueror. This makes it vastly more efficient and scalable, which is why it powers everything from Amazon Web Services to large-scale enterprise servers. It even supports paravirtualization, which sounds like something involving time travel but actually just means the guest operating systems know they’re not running on real hardware and politely adjust their behavior accordingly.
See also: Top 10 Virtualization platforms
VirtualBox started life in Germany in 2007 and was later adopted by Oracle, which means it now comes with all the love and warmth one expects from a giant corporate overlord. It’s the friendly, easy-going sort of hypervisor, perfect for people who just want to test things without setting up a data center in their basement. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and, crucially, doesn’t ask too many questions before letting you do ridiculous things like booting DOS inside Windows inside Linux inside itself. It’s also a Type 2 hypervisor, which is a fancy way of saying it needs an existing operating system to feel secure before it gets to work.
Xen, on the other hand, was born in the hallowed halls of Cambridge University in 2003, which means it probably wears a tweed jacket and looks down on the likes of VirtualBox. It’s a Type 1 hypervisor, meaning it doesn’t need an operating system to hold its hand—it just takes over the hardware directly, like a true conqueror. This makes it vastly more efficient and scalable, which is why it powers everything from Amazon Web Services to large-scale enterprise servers. It even supports paravirtualization, which sounds like something involving time travel but actually just means the guest operating systems know they’re not running on real hardware and politely adjust their behavior accordingly.
See also: Top 10 Virtualization platforms
