Server virtualization has become the cornerstone of cloud and data center workloads due to its vast economic, operational, technical, and management benefits. While there is plenty of software that plays a prominent role in the virtualization process, the choice of appropriate hypervisors for the shift from physical to virtual computing is very challenging considering their diversification and implementation complexities. Thus, choosing the right and ideal hypervisor software is crucial for businesses. The study is experimental in nature, where KVM and Oracle Virtual Box as type 2 and open-source hypervisors were critically screened for management features, their configuration, and performance analysis, taking advantage of the freely accessible source code. The study reveals that there is a high level of similarity between KVM and OVB in terms of the functionalities of their virtual machines, resource allocation, and compatibility with host and guest operating systems. The performance mismatch between the two hypervisors is mainly due to adopters’ misconfigurations at the virtual machine level. In general, KVM is highly recommended for enterprise and most sensitive data center workloads as it operates at the Linux level with the near-native speeds of their virtual machines. Future research can focus on highly affected KVM and OVB features, which are mostly addressed by vendor-released software patches as well as key performance inhibitors based on software design flaws and adopter misconfigurations from hardware abstraction to application level.