Open Source Linux Virtual Machine Software
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Virtual Machine Software for Linux
View 21 business solutionsBrowse free open source Virtual Machine software and projects for Linux below. Use the toggles on the left to filter open source Virtual Machine software by OS, license, language, programming language, and project status.
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Windows (Dockur)
Windows inside a Docker container
This project makes it surprisingly easy to run a Windows environment inside a Docker container by using a QEMU-based virtual machine under the hood. It provides a turnkey image and a simple set of environment variables so you can select Windows editions, control disk persistence, and access the VM via a web-based VNC console or similar remote viewers. Because the VM is wrapped in Docker, you can treat Windows as a disposable, repeatable service: create, snapshot with volumes, tear down, and rebuild with consistent results. The setup bundles sensible defaults for UEFI/OVMF firmware, virtio devices, and automated first-boot behavior to streamline installation. It’s handy for demos, testing, or hosted tooling that truly requires Windows but where you still want container-style workflows and orchestration. -
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Quickemu
Quickly create and run optimized Windows, macOS and Linux
Quickly create and run optimized Windows, macOS, and Linux virtual machines. Quickemu is a wrapper for the excellent QEMU that automatically "does the right thing" when creating virtual machines. No requirement for exhaustive configuration options. You decide what operating system you want to run and Quickemu takes care of the rest. The original objective of the project was to enable quick testing of Linux distributions where the virtual machines and their configuration can be stored anywhere (such as external USB storage or your home directory) and no elevated permissions are required to run the virtual machines. -
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metasploitable3-ub1404upgraded
An ova file for Metasploitable 3 ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine
An ova file for Metasploitable 3 ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine. Download here https://sourceforge.net/projects/metasploitable3-ub1404upgraded/files/ Upgraded build from this project https://github.com/rapid7/metasploitable3 apt update && apt upgrade ran on it Jan 8, 2022 . ESM repository not added so 169 or so security updates could be made further. Otherwise ubuntu no longer supplies upgrades to 14.04. Hard disk in vmdk format. To add to VirtualBox as a VM. Download Metasploitable3-ub1404.ova Selerct FILE tab, Choose Import Appliance Browse for this ova file on your computer. Modify settings such as RAM as desired, and name of VM, etc Deselect import hdd as vdi, if you want to keep vmdk format Then start the New VM. Username - vagrant;password - vagrant -
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Multipass
Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances
Multipass is a lightweight VM manager for Linux, Windows and macOS. It's designed for developers who want a fresh Ubuntu environment with a single command. It uses KVM on Linux, Hyper-V on Windows and QEMU on macOS to run the VM with minimal overhead. It can also use VirtualBox on Windows and macOS. Multipass will fetch images for you and keep them up to date. Since it supports metadata for cloud-init, you can simulate a small cloud deployment on your laptop or workstation. -
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Crosvm
The Chrome OS Virtual Machine Monitor
crosvm (ChromeOS Virtual Machine Monitor) is a secure, lightweight virtual machine monitor built on top of the Linux KVM hypervisor. Developed for ChromeOS, it is designed to isolate and execute Linux and Android guests efficiently while maintaining strong security boundaries. Unlike general-purpose emulators like QEMU, crosvm avoids full hardware emulation and focuses on modern paravirtualized I/O using the virtio standard, reducing complexity and attack surface. Written in Rust, it emphasizes memory safety and modularity, allowing sandboxed device emulation with fine-grained privilege separation. crosvm underpins several ChromeOS subsystems, including Android Runtime for Chrome (ARCVM) and Crostini Linux containers, enabling rich application compatibility within a tightly controlled environment. -
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macOS (Dockur)
macOS inside a Docker container
dockur/macos packages a macOS virtual machine inside a Docker container using QEMU/KVM, making it easy to spin up a macOS environment on a Linux host. It provides sensible defaults for firmware, disk, and devices, plus a browser-accessible VNC console so you can complete installation and interact with the desktop remotely. Typical inputs—like environment variables and mounted volumes—control edition choice, storage persistence, and resource sizing, which makes runs repeatable and disposable. Because it’s containerized, you can script lifecycle operations, snapshot state via volumes, and integrate the VM into CI or demo setups without a traditional hypervisor UI. Performance depends on host capabilities and whether hardware acceleration is available, but for light GUI tasks, tooling, or sandboxing, it’s surprisingly practical. Users should bring their own valid media and licenses, and be mindful of platform terms and host resource limits. -
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kvm, or kernel-based virtual machine, is a device driver and userspace component for Linux that utilizes hardware virtualization extensions such as Intel's VT to create virtual machines running on a Linux host.
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The open-vm-tools project provides a suite of open source virtualization utilities and drivers to improve the functionality and user experience of virtualization. The project currently runs in guest operating systems under VMware virtualization.
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LXD
Powerful system container and virtual machine manager
LXD is a next-generation system container and virtual machine manager. It offers a unified user experience around full Linux systems running inside containers or virtual machines. LXD is image based and provides images for a wide number of Linux distributions. It provides flexibility and scalability for various use cases, with support for different storage backends and network types and the option to install on hardware ranging from an individual laptop or cloud instance to a full server rack. When using LXD, you can manage your instances (containers and VMs) with a simple command line tool, directly through the REST API or by using third-party tools and integrations. LXD implements a single REST API for both local and remote access. The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors. -
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AQEMU
a GUI for virtual machines using QEMU as the backend
AQEMU is a GUI for virtual machines using QEMU as the backend. Support for the KVM accelerator on Linux is provided. The application has a user-friendly interface and allows to set a large number of options. -
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TiEmu is an emulator of Texas Instruments hand-helds (TI89/92/92+/V200) for Linux & Windows written with GTK. Full-featured with a graphical debugger.
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OpenJ9
A Java Virtual Machine for OpenJDK
A Java Virtual Machine for OpenJDK that's optimized for small footprint, fast start-up, and high throughput. Builds on Eclipse OMR and combines with the Extensions for OpenJDK for OpenJ9 repo. We're not sure which route you might have taken on your way here, but we're really pleased to see you! If you came directly from our website, you've probably already learned a lot about Eclipse OpenJ9 and how it fits into the OpenJDK ecosystem. Eclipse OpenJ9 is an independent implementation of a Java Virtual Machine. "Independent implementation" means it was built using the Java Virtual Machine specification without using any code from any other Java Virtual Machine. The OpenJ9 JVM combines with the Java Class libraries from OpenJDK to create a complete JDK tuned for footprint, performance, and reliability that is well suited for cloud deployments. The original source contribution to OpenJ9 came from the IBM "J9" JVM which has been used in production by thousands of Java applications. -
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macintosh.js
A virtual Apple Macintosh with System 8, running in Electron
This is Mac OS 8, running in an Electron app pretending to be a 1991 Macintosh Quadra. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Bear in mind that this is written entirely in JavaScript, so please adjust your expectations. The virtual machine is emulating a 1991 Macintosh Quadra 900 with a Motorola CPU, which Apple used before switching to the PowerPC architecture (Apple/IBM/Motorola) in the mid 1990s. You'll find various games and demos preinstalled, thanks to an old MacWorld Demo CD from 1997. Namely, Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons. There are also various apps and trials preinstalled, including Photoshop 3, Premiere 4, Illustrator 5.5, StuffIt Expander, the Apple Web Page Construction Kit, and more. -
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phpVirtualBox
A web-based front-end to VirtualBox written in PHP
phpVirtualBox - An open source, AJAX implementation of the VirtualBox user interface written in PHP. As a modern web interface, it allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. phpVirtualBox is designed to allow users to administer VirtualBox in a headless environment - mirroring the VirtualBox GUI through its web interface. -
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Packer
Build Automated Machine Images
Packer is an open source, automated machine image creation tool. It is designed to create any type of machine image for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Lightweight yet modern, Packer encourages the use of automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images. It is highly performant, able to run on every major operating system and create machine images for several platforms in parallel. Packer supports a great number of platforms out of the box, and support for other platforms can be added through plugins. Any image it creates can also be easily turned into Vagrant boxes. -
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Jasmin is a Java Assembler. It takes ASCII descriptions for Java classes, written in a simple assembler-like syntax. It converts them into binary Java .class class files suitable for loading into a Java Virtual Machine implementation.
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Boot2Docker
Linux distribution made specifically to run Docker containers
Boot2Docker is a lightweight Linux distribution made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely from RAM, is a ~45MB download and boots quickly. Boot2Docker is designed and tuned for development. Using it for any kind of production workloads is highly discouraged. Installation should be performed via Docker Toolbox which installs Docker Machine, the Boot2Docker VM, and other necessary tools. Boot2Docker is used via Docker Machine (installed as part of Docker Toolbox) which leverages VirtualBox's VBoxManage to initialise, start, stop and delete the VM right from the command line. Docker Machine auto logs in using the generated SSH key, but if you want to SSH into the machine manually (or you're not using a Docker Machine managed VM), you can do so. Boot2docker uses Tiny Core Linux, which runs from RAM and so does not persist filesystem changes by default. -
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MoarVM
A runtime built for the 6model object system
Short for "Metamodel On A Runtime", MoarVM is a modern virtual machine built for the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler and the NQP Compiler Toolchain. MoarVM is used by the majority of Perl 6 programmers. Highlights include: Great Unicode support, with strings represented at grapheme level, dynamic analysis of running code to identify hot functions and loops, and perform a range of optimizations, including type specialization and inlining, support for threads, a range of concurrency control constructs, and asynchronous sockets, timers, processes, and more, generational, parallel, garbage collection, support for numerous language features, including first class functions, exceptions, continuations, runtime loading of code, big integers and interfacing with native libraries. MoarVM provides very little directly - and that's a good thing. It is not tied to a particular way of doing inheritance, roles, mixins, method resolution, type-checking, and so forth. -
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Easy control of virtual machines of VirtualBox (virtualization solution) on a Linux headless server. Autostart and autosave on boot/halt. Start, stop, save, backup and show status of sessions in batch mode from command line.
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X11-Basic
A BASIC interpreter and compiler with graphics.
X11-Basic is a dialect of the BASIC programming language with graphics capability that integrates features like shell scripting, cgi-Programming and full graphical visualisation into the easy to learn basic language on modern computers. -
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AtomVM
Tiny Erlang VM
Brings Erlang, Elixir and other functional languages to really small systems. AtomVM implements from scratch a minimal Erlang VM that supports a subset of ErlangVM features and that is able to run unmodified BEAM binaries on really small systems like MCUs. There is much more information, including a more complete "Getting Started Guide," extensive documentation, examples, and contact information available on the AtomVM project website. AtomVM aims to be easily portable to new platforms with a minimum effort, so additional platforms might be supported in a near future. AtomVM is still in its early stages, but it can run simple applications similar to those available in examples and tests. This basically means that an instruction has not been implemented yet, or that an outdated version has been used. Please, make sure to always run AtomVM using latest version. -
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AutomatedLab
Framework that lets you deploy complex labs on HyperV and Azure
AutomatedLab is a provisioning solution and framework that lets you deploy complex labs on HyperV and Azure with simple PowerShell scripts. It supports all Windows operating systems from 2008 R2 to 2019, some Linux distributions and various products like AD, Exchange, PKI, IIS, etc. AutomatedLab (AL) enables you to setup test and lab environments on Hyper-v or Azure with multiple products or just a single VM in a very short time. There are only two requirements you need to make sure: You need the DVD ISO images and a Hyper-V host or an Azure subscription. Requires Windows Management Framework 5+ (Windows). Requires Intel VT-x or AMD/V capable CPU, a decent amount of RAM, and low-latency high-throughput storage (No spinning disks please, as there are issues related to them). This solution supports setting up virtual machines with Windows 7, 2008 R2, 8 / 8.1 and 2012 / 2012 R2, 10 / 2016, 2019, and SQL Server 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019. -
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Kata Containers
Build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs)
Kata Containers is an open source container runtime, building lightweight virtual machines that seamlessly plug into the container ecosystem. Kata Containers is an open source community working to build a secure container runtime with lightweight virtual machines that feel and perform like containers, but provide stronger workload isolation using hardware virtualization technology as a second layer of defense. Since launching in December 2017, the community successfully merged the best parts of Intel Clear Containers with Hyper.sh RunV and scaled to include support for major architectures including AMD64, ARM, IBM p-series, and IBM z-series in addition to x86_64. Kata Containers also supports multiple hypervisors including QEMU, Cloud-Hypervisor, and Firecracker, and integrates with the containerd project among others. -
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macOS Simple KVM
Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM
macOS-Simple-KVM is a project that provides scripts and configuration files to easily set up and run macOS in a virtual machine using QEMU and KVM. It simplifies what is typically a complex process by offering a straightforward approach to creating a macOS VM on Linux systems with hardware virtualization support. The repository includes tools for preparing installation media, configuring virtual hardware, and managing VM launch scripts. By using KVM acceleration, the virtual machine runs with near-native performance, making it useful for testing, development, or personal experimentation. The project also supports GPU passthrough and other advanced configurations for users who want a more optimized macOS VM environment. While primarily intended for educational and testing purposes, it demonstrates how macOS can be virtualized outside of Apple hardware.
