[mschuster91]

if you're large enough (i.e. you have the compute demand and the staff to justify the expense for the latter), OpenStack - you should be able to keep most of your hardware, OpenStack supports everyone and their dog, which is what makes the "find capable operations staff" and "get it running" parts so much more difficult.

Desktop? Learn to live with Oracle's VirtualBox and pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Small home lab? Hand-roll QEMU-KVM.

[Dalewyn]

>pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Worth mentioning that the Extension Pack is distributed separately[1] from VirtualBox itself and requires deliberate installation. Put more simply, it's an opt-in.

I'll also mention that, at least for most personal and even small business use cases, you probably don't need the features provided by the Extension Pack[2]:

* VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support.

* Host webcam passthrough.

* Intel PXE boot ROM.

* Disk image encryption with AES algorithm.

* Cloud integration features.

[1]: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

[2]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing

[jandrese]

For what it is worth I get a lot of use out of VirtualBox and I've never seen much point in installing the extension pack.