Best Hypervisors for Startups

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4, 2.6, 3.x and 4.x), Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2, and OpenBSD. VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company.

Virtuozzo, is a global leader in alternative cloud enablement, providing unique, purpose-built software which enables infrastructure and platform solutions to over 600 service providers around the world. Performance, flexibility, and ease of use define the product line up. Our partners can quickly, cost effectively and profitably create alternative private, public, hybrid or multi-clouds, rivalling those from major cloud providers, but with greater ROI, and customization. Service providers and enterprises can choose between various products and capabilities, using software defined networking, storage and powerful compute management and monitoring. Virtuozzo’s primary products allow for the rapid construction of virtual private servers (VPS), IaaS, PaaS, Storage-as-a-Service, Kubernetes-as-a-Service, WordPress-as-a-Service and Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS).

Build virtualization solutions on top of a lightweight hypervisor, without third-party kernel extensions. Hypervisor provides C APIs so you can interact with virtualization technologies in user space, without writing kernel extensions (KEXTs). As a result, the apps you create using this framework are suitable for distribution on the Mac App Store. Use this framework to create and control hardware-facilitated virtual machines and virtual processors (VMs and vCPUs) from your entitled, sandboxed, user-space process. Hypervisor abstracts virtual machines as processes, and virtual processors as threads. The Hypervisor framework requires hardware support to virtualize hardware resources. On Apple silicon, that includes the Virtualization Extensions. On Intel-based Mac computers, the framework supports machines with an Intel VT-x feature set that includes Extended Page Tables (EPT) and Unrestricted Mode.

Whether you need to run Windows programs that don’t have Mac versions, or you are making the switch from PC to Mac and need to transfer your data, Parallels Desktop has you covered. Develop & test across multiple OSes in a virtual machine for Mac. Access Microsoft Office for Windows and Internet Explorer. Fast—run Windows apps without slowing down your Mac. Quickly move files, apps and more from a PC to a Mac. Use Windows side-by-side with macOS (no restarting required) on your MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, iMac Pro, Mac mini or Mac Pro. Share files and folders, copy and paste images and text & drag and drop files between Mac and Windows applications. Parallels Desktop automatically detects what you need to get started so you are up and going within minutes! If you need Windows, you’ll be prompted to Download and Install Windows 10 OR Choose your existing Windows, Linux, Ubuntu, or Boot Camp installation.

QEMU is a generic and open-source machine emulator and virtualizer. Run operating systems for any machine, on any supported architecture. Run programs for another Linux/BSD target, on any supported architecture. Run KVM and Xen virtual machines with near-native performance. Guest memory dumps are now fully supported, along with pre-copy/post-copy migration and background guest snapshots. Support for nw DEVICE_UNPLUG_GUEST_ERROR to detect guest-reported hotplug failures. macOS hosts with Apple Silicon CPUs now support ‘hvf’ accelerator for AArch64 guests. M-profile MVE extension is now supported for Cortex-M55. AMD SEV guests now support measurement of kernel binary when doing direct kernel boot (not using a bootloader). Support for vhost-user and numa mem options across all boards.

Triton SmartOS combines the capabilities you get from a lightweight container OS, optimized to deliver containers, with the robust security, networking and storage capabilities you’ve come to expect and depend on from a hardware hypervisor. Triton SmartOS leverages Zones, a hardened container runtime environment that does not depend upon VM hosts for security. Patented resource protections insulate containers and ensure that each container gets its fair share of I/O. Triton SmartOS eliminates the complexities associated with VM host dependent solutions. Built-in networking offers each container one or more network interfaces, so each container has a full IP stack and is a full peer on the network, eliminating port conflicts and making network management easy. Secure, isolated, resizable filesystems for each container. The speed of bare metal performance + the flexibility of virtualization.

Hyper-V is Microsoft's hardware virtualization product. It lets you create and run a software version of a computer, called a virtual machine. Each virtual machine acts like a complete computer, running an operating system and programs. When you need computing resources, virtual machines give you more flexibility, help save time and money, and are a more efficient way to use hardware than just running one operating system on physical hardware. Each supported guest operating system has a customized set of services and drivers, called integration services, that make it easier to use the operating system in a Hyper-V virtual machine. Hyper-V includes Virtual Machine Connection, a remote connection tool for use with both Windows and Linux. Unlike Remote Desktop, this tool gives you console access, so you can see what's happening in the guest even when the operating system isn't booted yet.

Designed for efficiency and optimized for performance, Oracle's server virtualization products support x86 and SPARC architectures and a variety of workloads such as Linux, Windows and Oracle Solaris. In addition to solutions that are hypervisor-based, Oracle also offers virtualization built in to hardware and Oracle operating systems to deliver the most complete and optimized solution for your entire computing environment.

VMware Workstation Pro is the industry standard for running multiple operating systems as virtual machines (VMs) on a single Linux or Windows PC. IT professionals, developers and businesses who build, test or demo software for any device, platform or cloud rely on Workstation Pro. VMware Workstation Pro allows you to run multiple operating systems at once on the same Windows or Linux PC. Create real Linux and Windows VMs and other desktop, server, and tablet environments, complete with configurable virtual networking and network condition simulation, for use in code development, solution architecting, application testing, product demonstrations and more. Securely connect with vSphere, ESXi or other Workstation servers to launch, control and manage both virtual machines (VMs) and physical hosts. A common VMware hypervisor maximizes productivity and enables easy transfer of VMs to and from your local PC.

Discover a robust, bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto your physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi effectively partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs. It’s the industry leader for efficient architecture, setting the standard for reliability, performance, and support. IT teams are under constant pressure to meet fluctuating market trends and heightened customer demands. At the same time, they must stretch IT resources to accommodate increasingly complex projects. Fortunately, ESXi helps balance the need for both better business outcomes and IT savings.

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko. Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc. KVM is open source software. The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux, as of 2.6.20. The userspace component of KVM is included in mainline QEMU, as of 1.3.

Xvisor® is an open-source type-1 hypervisor, which aims at providing a monolithic, light-weight, portable, and flexible virtualization solution. It provides a high performance and low memory foot print virtualization solution for ARMv5, ARMv6, ARMv7a, ARMv7a-ve, ARMv8a, x86_64, RISC-V and other CPU architectures. In comparison to other ARM hypervisors, it is one of the few hypervisors providing support for ARM CPUs which do not have ARM virtualization extensions. In RISC-V world, it is world first Type-1 RISC-V hypervisor. The Xvisor source code is highly portable and can be easily ported to most general-purpose 32-bit or 64-bit architectures as long as they have a paged memory management unit (PMMU) and a port of the GNU C compiler (GCC). Xvisor primarily supports Full virtualization hence, supports a wide range of unmodified Guest operating systems. Paravirtualization is optional for Xvisor and will be supported in an architecture independent manner (such as VirtIO PCI/MMIO devices).

Lguest allows you to run multiple copies of the same 32-bit kernel, simply modprobe lg, then run Documentation/lguest/lguest to create a new guest. I suggest you try this yourself, lguest is incredibly easy to get up and running. It's also quite useful: I can test-boot kernels with it in less than a second, or about 10x faster than basic qemu, and 100x faster than a real boot. And as it uses a pty as console, you can do things like pipe it through grep. lguest is all one big kernel patch, including the launcher. It's in 2.6.23-git13 and above. Lguest aims to isolate the guest so it cannot reach outside to the host (except for virtual devices supplied by the host of course), even if the guest is malicious. However, a malicious guest kernel can currently pin host memory (up to the amount of memory allowed to the guest). Most images are set up to create a console virtual consoles (/dev/tty0 etc), but the lguest console is /dev/hvc0.

µ-visor is Green Hill Software’s virtualization solution for microcontrollers. It features robust hardware-enforced software separation, multiple-OS support and real-time efficiency to safely and securely consolidate critical workloads on resource-constrained processors. µ-visor’s scalable and efficient architecture guarantees freedom-from-interference to multiple operating systems running on the same CPU and offers flexible options to fully utilize multiple cores and limited processor resources. Like other Green Hills products, µ-visor is designed for systems with critical requirements for industry-specific safety and security certifications and it enjoys the powerful support of Green Hills’ advanced integrated development tools. µ-visor’s virtual machines and their operating systems enjoy freedom-from-interference from each other through hardware-enforced separation

IBM z/VM is an operating system with security-rich and scalable hypervisor and virtualization technology designed to run guest servers such as Linux, z/OS and z/TPF virtual machines as well as Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE servers. IBM z/VM runs hundreds to thousands of guest servers on a single IBM Z or IBM LinuxONE server with high efficiency and elasticity. It supports multiple machine images and architectures, simplifying migrations, facilitating application transitions, and consolidating systems onto one server. IBM z/VM excels in sharing system resources among virtual machines, offering extreme scalability, security, and efficiency, leading to cost savings and a robust foundation for cognitive computing. Use on-premises cloud computing in a hybrid cloud strategy. Scale and run thousands of Linux and container workloads efficiently. Help ensure continuous availability with IBM's resiliency offerings.

The AWS Nitro System is the foundation for the latest generation of Amazon EC2 instances, enabling AWS to innovate faster, reduce costs for customers, and deliver enhanced security and new instance types. By reimagining virtualization infrastructure, AWS has offloaded functions such as CPU, storage, and networking virtualization to dedicated hardware and software, allowing nearly all server resources to be allocated to instances. This architecture comprises several key components: Nitro Cards, which offload and accelerate I/O for functions like VPC, EBS, and instance storage; the Nitro Security Chip, providing a minimized attack surface and prohibiting administrative access to eliminate human error and tampering; and the Nitro Hypervisor, a lightweight hypervisor that manages memory and CPU allocation, delivering performance nearly indistinguishable from bare metal. The Nitro System's modular design allows for rapid delivery of EC2 instance types.

Red Hat® Virtualization is an enterprise virtualization platform that supports key virtualization workloads including resource-intensive and critical applications, built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux® and KVM and fully supported by Red Hat. Virtualize your resources, processes, and applications with a stable foundation for a cloud-native and containerized future. Automate, manage, and modernize your virtualization workloads. Whether automating daily operations or managing your VMs in Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Virtualization uses the Linux® skills your team knows and will build upon for future business needs. Built on an ecosystem of platform and partner solutions and integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat OpenStack® Platform, and Red Hat OpenShift to improve overall IT productivity and drive a higher return on investment.

Proxmox VE is a complete open-source platform for all-inclusive enterprise virtualization that tightly integrates KVM hypervisor and LXC containers, software-defined storage and networking functionality on a single platform, and easily manages high availability clusters and disaster recovery tools with the built-in web management interface.

oVirt is an open-source distributed virtualization solution, designed to manage your entire enterprise infrastructure. oVirt uses the trusted KVM hypervisor and is built upon several other community projects, including libvirt, Gluster, PatternFly, and Ansible.

VMware Fusion gives Mac users the power to run Windows on Mac along with hundreds of other operating systems side by side with Mac applications, without rebooting. Fusion is simple enough for home users and powerful enough for IT professionals, developers and businesses. Running Windows on Mac is only the beginning. VMware Fusion lets you choose from hundreds of supported operating systems, from lesser-known Linux distributions to the latest Windows 10 release, to run side by side with the latest macOS release. Fusion makes it simple to test nearly any OS and app on a Mac. Build and test apps in a sandbox while securely sharing local source files and folders. Fusion Pro now includes a RESTful API to integrate with modern development tools like Docker, Vagrant, Ansible, Chef, and others to fit the power of VMware into today’s Agile and DevOps-oriented production pipelines.

LXD is a next generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead. It's image based with pre-made images available for a wide number of Linux distributions and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API. To get a better idea of what LXD is and what it does, you can try it online! Then if you want to run it locally, take a look at our getting started guide. The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors. The core of LXD is a privileged daemon which exposes a REST API over a local unix socket as well as over the network (if enabled). Clients, such as the command line tool provided with LXD itself then do everything through that REST API. It means that whether you're talking to your local host or a remote server, everything works the same way.

Lots of people talk about open source. Talk is cheap. We code. Run your Windows® app on MacOS, Linux, or ChromeOS. CrossOver Mac® Do you like buying Windows® licenses? You do? Great. You do you. For the rest of humanity, CrossOver is the easiest way to run many Microsoft applications on your Mac without a clunky Windows emulator. (Seriously, have you tried emulators? Do you like how they run on your Mac?) CrossOver works differently. It's not an emulator. It does the work of translating Windows commands into Mac commands so that you can run Windows software as if it were designed native to Mac. CrossOver works with all kinds of software - productivity software, utility programs, and games - all with one application. CrossOver Linux® You are the noble of the noblest running Linux. You don't want the despair of running a Windows OS on your finely minted machine. You don't want to sell your soul for a Windows license or squander away your hard drive shekels running a virtual machine