Virtual Machines (VM) are software environments that simulate a computer system. It can be used as a replacement for a physical machine. They are based on computer architectures and provide the same functionality as physical computers. Virtualization Manager allows you to monitor and manage virtual machines, which can help you optimize performance. This tool supports a variety of software such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHAV.
What is a Virtual Machine?
Virtual Machine is software environments that simulate a computer system. It can be used as a replacement for a physical machine. They are based on computer architectures and provide the same functionality as a real computer.
Top 10 Free Virtual Machine Software
Below is a list of Top Virtual Machines Software on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This list includes both open-source (free) as well as commercial (paid).
1. Virtualization Manager
Virtualization Manager is a virtual machine monitoring and management tool that manager helps you to optimize performance issues. This tool supports VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHAV. This tool provides multi-hypervisor alerting and remediation in one pane. AppStack™ dashboard allows you to automatically plot the relationship between hosts, servers, applications and data stores.
Features:
- Virtual machines can be managed across hybrid, cloud, and on-premises environments.
- It offers a completely customizable and sleek dashboard. Drag-and-drop widgets make it easy to customize your dashboard.
- It provides VMware log monitoring, which can speed up troubleshooting.
- Hyper-V can be integrated with this application.
- The performance of Nutanix ATV can be monitored.
- Supported Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
Also read: Why is Elara App Preventing Shutdown in Windows 11/10?
2. VM Monitor
VM Monitor is a tool that monitors your Microsoft HyperV host and VMware virtual machine in real-time. This allows you to see CPU, memory usage, and the number of configured or running VMs.
Features:
- Offers monitoring virtualization server.
- You can see threshold-specific indicators to help you prevent performance degradation.
- This allows you to end powered-off VMs or VM snapshots that are exceeding your resources.
- Details such as VM name, VM status, and guest OS can be viewed.
- VM monitoring allows you to quickly pinpoint the root cause.
- It will notify you about issues related to performance or availability.
- Supported platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux
3. VMware Fusion (Mac)
VMware Fusion for Mac virtual machine software. This tool is well-known for virtualization and cloud computing. You can run multiple applications on different OS at once with Fusion. Fusion allows integration with many development tools.
Features:
Features:
- It provides the best Desktop Hypervisor, Run Virtual Machines, and Kubernetes Clusters for Mac.
- This program allows you to modify the virtual network topology and simulate packet loss.
- The Guest tool provides enhanced 3D graphics, including DirectX 11 support and 8GB vGPU support.
- VMware vSphere can be connected. vSphere is a cloud-based platform that allows virtualization.
- This virtualization machine allows you to use Windows, Linux, and NetWare on your Mac.
- Supported platform: Intel Mac models which support macOS 10.15 Catalina or newer versions.
4. Parallels
Parallels are the fastest and easiest virtual desktop application to run on Windows or Mac without having to reboot. Parallels make it easy to deploy hundreds upon thousands of installations. Parallels allow you to run multiple Windows apps such as Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Quicken, and QuickBooks without compromising their performance.
Features:
- Receives real-time licensing activity and usage statistics.
- You can easily enroll new users with just a few clicks using automatically generated emails.
- The Virtual machine seamlessly runs Windows on your Mac side-by-side. You can switch between Windows and Mac with just one click.
- More than 200,000 Windows applications can be run on your Mac.
- This program allows you to easily move and share content between Windows and Mac.
- Supported Platforms: Windows 11, 10, 8.1, and 7, Linux, macOS*, and more.
5. VMware Workstation Player
VMware workstation player is designed for developers and IT professionals. You can choose VMware Workstation players to be your virtual machine, you will be able seamlessly to share files between hosts and guests. You can also connect to vSphere to act as your remote data center. This is the best way for you to learn about Virtualization and Operating Systems, Containers, or the VMware ecosystem.
- It supports 200+ Windows instances
- Snapshot allows you to create multiple instances and rollback points for the virtual machine.
- This feature is compatible with Hyper-V, WSL2, and Device Guard features of Windows 10.
- This allows you to run Windows XP and Windows 7 in a virtual environment using modern hardware.
- Supported Platforms: Windows 10, 8 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Oracle Linux, OpenSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
6. Hyper-V
Hyper-V, Previously known as Windows Server Virtualization. It’s a hypervisor that creates virtual machines on x86 and 64 systems. Hyper-V is a hypervisor that allows a server computer to expose virtual machines to one or multiple networks. It was compatible with multiple operating systems including Windows, Linux and Free BSD.
Features:
- It allows for hardware virtualization.
- Hyper-V can be used to support a cloud-based platform.
- It supports many Linux versions.
- It allows you to run multiple virtual machines.
- This feature allows you to clone multiple versions of VMs in a secure environment.
- Supported platforms: Windows (Vista SP2, 7, 8, 8.1, 10), FreeBSD, Linux, CentOS, Red Hat Linux, SUSE
7. VirtualBox
VirtualBox is an open-source hypervisor that runs on x86 computers. VirtualBox is a powerful VM software that allows you to create and manage virtual machines. It works on Windows, Linux, and BSD. VirtualBox’s ability to transfer virtual machines from one host to the next is one of its most notable features.
Features:
- You can adjust the window’s size.
- This Windows 10 VM software is free and supports drag & drop.
- You can run any application from your computer with this Virtual machine tool.
- You can run multiple guest windows simultaneously on the same machine.
- You can run both Windows and macOS applications in seamless mode.
- Supported platforms: Linux and Mac, Windows, Solaris, and OpenSolaris.
Also read: 8 Best Kali Linux Tools For 2023
8. QEMU
QEMU is a popular emulator and virtualization machine short for Quick Emulator. This system can run applications for Linux, BSD, and Windows and support full system emulation on all supported platforms.
Features:
- It is one the most powerful virtual machine software, as it supports multiple OS and can be used on any system.
- Hardware virtualization.
- It can be used with any system. There are no restrictions on the OS host.
- QEMU achieves near-native performance because it executes the guest code directly on a host CPU.
- Supported platforms: Linux for Windows, Mac, Open BSD, and FreeBSD for Solaris host OS
9. Gnome Boxes
Boxes is a virtualization management and creation tool. It is the best Linux VM software and allows you to customize virtually any virtualization tool.
Features:
- It allows you to locate your remote and local virtual systems.
- This program allows you to set your preferences and monitors the performance of your machine.
- It is a safe and simple way to test out new operating systems.
- This tool allows for remote connection.
- Boxes share much of the code with the virtmanager project, mostly in the form libvirt and libosinfo.
- You can take photos and it automatically saves to the list.
- Supported platforms: CentOS Stream (Debian, Fedora), Microsoft Windows, Fedora and OpenSUSE. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ubuntu is not supported.
10. Red Hat Virtualization
Red Hat Virtualization is an open-source platform for software-defined platforms. It provides virtualization for Linux OS and Microsoft Windows OS. It is one of the most popular free Virtual machine software. It allows single management, provision of new VMs, and clones and shows how everything works together.
Features:
- Red Hat Virtualization can be set up and managed easily.
- It is open-source, which means you can integrate it with other systems according to your requirements.
- It is a community-powered open source that delivers high performance in Kubernetes and Linux environments.
- Red Hat virtualization can be set up and managed easily.
- Supported platforms: Linux, Windows.
