Virtual Machines
A virtual machine (VM) is a sandboxed operating system, running within your current system. Useful for compartmentalisation and safely testing software, or handling potentially malicious files
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Open source, powerful, feature-rich virtualization product, supporting x86 and AMD64/Intel64 architectures. Available for Windows, MacOS, Linux and BSD, and free for both personal and enterprise use. VirtualBox is backed by a strong community, and has been under active development since 2007.
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Open source virtual machine monitor intended to serve as a type-1 hyperviser for multiple operating systems using the same hardware - very useful for servers, as it allows for fully independent virtual Linux machines.
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Open source, feature rich, powerful type 2 hypervisor for Mac, can emulate x86-64 OSes on Apple Silicon Macs. There's also an iOS version (so you can run Windows on your iPhone!)
Objective of this page
Find the best free, open source, E2E encrypted and private alternative to now.
Compare VirtualBox vs Xen Project vs UTM vs
Discover the best Virtual Machines tools for Android, iPhone, Linux, PC and Chrome to download now. And choose secure, self-hosted, peer-to-peer and independant alternatives in 2024
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Notable Mentions
QEMU is a virtual hardware emulation tool, meaning it is less appropriate for creating fully independant sandboxes, but performance is considerable better than that of a traditional virtual machine.
VMWare is popular in the enterprise world, it is not open source, and although there is a free version, a license is required to access all features. VMWare performs very well when running on a server, with hundreds of hosts and users.
For Mac users, Parallels is a popular option which performs really well, but again is not open source.
For Windows users, there's Hyper-V, which is a native Windows product, developed by Microsoft.
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