How compatible are VMWare and VirtualBox?

At my workplace, everyone uses VMware Player (and some people have licenses for Workstation). We frequently share VMs to save time on development setup. However, I would really like to take advantage of the Snapshot feature in VirtualBox since I am unable to acquire a license for Workstation.

I have read that VirtualBox has no issues reading VMWare VMs (including VMs with snapshots). However, I'm worried about how compatible things are the other way.

In VirtualBox, I open up a VM created in VMware and create multiple snapshots. Can the resulting files be opened in VMware?

Solution 1:

I have used VMWare VMDK files under VirtualBox with great success, but not for the past 18 months or so, during which VB has had multiple releases. I would be surprised if it did not work. However, VMWare would not be able to handle VB snapshots--you'd have to "accept" (I don't remember the actual word) all the changes recorded in the snapshots to make a single VMDK file for your VMWare-using co-workers to use the file.

Solution 2:

They can coexist but they don't really share VM container files very well. Also, VirtualBox supports ACPI 2.0 guests, but VMware Workstation 7.1.4 still does not (if that matters).