Does VirtualBox have any advantages over VMWare Player?

I've been using VMWare Player for ages now for both Windows development on my Linux box and (more importantly) automated testing of Windows applications.

Basically what I do is to:

• have my development VM running and I build my code and automatically transfer the install package to Linux.
• when this shows up at Linux, automatically copy a "known-state", snapshot VM to my test work area (I say snapshot but it's really just a backup copy of the whole directory, not a real VMWare snapshot).
• also automatically start the VM in the work area once it's copied.
• the VM has a single never-changing startup script which pulls a real startup script from Linux and runs it.
• that startup script is responsible for getting down the install package and doing a silent install.
• it then runs a test suite and uploads results back to Linux where I have automated scripts which check them.

So, it's basically a one-button test process.

Now I notice more and more people seem to be using VirtualBox.

First off, I'd like to confirm that it can also do a similar thing, primarily being able to backup and restore whole VMs and having shared folders between VirtualBox and Linux.

Secondly, and this is the crux: I'd like to know if that has any concrete advantages over VMWare Player, especially for the开发者_Go百科 automated testing jobs.

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I switched to VirtualBox because of one concrete advantage, I wasn't able to setup the network as I wanted to in player. I don't remember if it was bridging or port-forward or whatever that didn't work, but something didn't work the way I wanted it to with the network-setup (cause I needed the pay-version for that) and thus I switched. Personally I've found that both have good and bad sides, but I still use virtualbox cause of that network-thing.