VirtualBox and VMware are separate VMs from Microsoft's Virtual Machine. MVM was released so that the XP OS and software could be run on a Windows 7 machine. (A lot of old software will run on Seven without it.) When the trial release of Windows 8 came out, MVM would not run it so everyone used V-Box or VMware.
I run MVM with XP and VirtualBox with an evaluation copy of Windows 8. The drawback with most virtual machine software is the lack of hardware support and
drivers. When I was evaluating VM software, I found that VMware didn't support USB so I went with VirtualBox. (Don't know about the current version of VMware.) In any case, both are capable VMs as long as you don't have hardware beyond the basics.