Good Day to everyone! My name is Glen, a student & taking up Computer System Servicing for 1 year in technical vocational school. This is my initial question and as my introduction, what is the best virtualbox player VM Ware or Oracle? I have desktop pc running in Windows 7, 86 bit with 2gb memory ram. I want to learn how to use linux ubuntu-samba server and centOS in my Windows based PC. Our major topic in school was how to run and use linux based server as admin server/client. Many thanks!

Welcome to LQ!!! I prefer VBox; many on lq seem to recommend it.
(Glance at osboxes.org for pre-installed .vdi)

Enjoy!!! Let us know how things go.

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+1 for me!

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I would also suggest starting with VirtualBox. However, I would also suggest adding more memory if possible. You should be able to run one guest reasonably well depending on what desktop you run if any and it might slow down the host depending on what apps you run.

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I echo the opinion of those suggesting VirtualBox.

I also heartily agree with michaelk's suggestion for more RAM. You are going to find things slow with 2GB. I would try to increase to at least 4GB - you'll get a performance boost even if you're on a 32-bit version of Windows 7.

Cheers - let us know how you make out.

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I think OP's "86 bit" means 64bit. IF you stick with CLI, which IMHO is far more valuable for learning than playingGUI, 2G ram is fine. Try running several VBoxes of this 7MB!!! .iso at once, to begin learning simple cli and networking in vbox, in only a few minutes!!! (nothing but busybox, so no samba here; 96mb 'v'ram is fine; the tiniest-possible .vdi is fine, or none; try several nics with different vbox networks). Linux is amazing!!!

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Easy enough to install both and learn both. They share many of the same concepts and learning them helps you understand other virtual machines I'd think.

Others are correct in resource management. Along those same lines, we'd hope that you have a well supported hardware. I have used bochs/qemu a long time ago without any hardware support and it gets rather slowwwww.

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My experience with VMWare ... that is to say, commonly-available retail versions ... is that they are "deliberately-hobbled horses." VMWare seems to be perfectly aware of what are the most-essential features in any virtual machine, and they seem determined to "surprise you" that the version which you innocently purchased does not, in fact, do everything that you expected it to do. (At which point they expect you to buy another, more-expensive version, and with no credit for the version that they suckered you into buying you bought before.)

"Per contra, VirtualBox."

Backed by a company that is bigger than VMWare ... Oracle Corporation (yes, "the humongous-database people, Larry Ellison's yacht and all of that") ... the open version of VirtualBox will prove to have all of the features that you actually need, without niggling restrictions and(!) entirely without cost.

"Thanks, Larry. Smooth Sailing.™"

I also prefer VirtualBox.

Guys thank you for your overwhelming replies. This would improve my study a lot in the future..