What's the Best Free Virtual Machine system?

Question

I've messed with Virtual Machine software before and for me it works very well for multi-platform testing. My question is what virtual machine systems out there that are free are available that can do things like cloning, state saving and branching, and have low overhead in terms of modifying the host system.

For right now I'm using VirtualBox which seems to be a reasonable fit for me.

Answer 1

On Windows, just about your only other option is VMware Server, even though it doesn't have a low overhead on the host. QEMU is very slow.

Answer 2

Consider Hyper-V (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv.aspx). I think it comes free with Win2k8

Answer 3

Depends on your needs, to some extent. For example, Microsoft offers a handy Virtual PC VHD for testing your website in various versions of IE. Perfect for that scenario.

Answer 4

+1 for VirtualBox. I have been using it for testing different Linux distributions and for a free VM it works quite well.

Answer 5

I started to use SUN's VirtualBox recently. It runs Windows XP on an Ubuntu box smoothly. I have never tried it on a Windows host, but that should work as well.

Answer 6

On Linux, you can use QEMU which is quite fast when using kqemu or KVM. The latter requires hardware virtualization features.

Answer 7

I use Microsoft's free Virtual PC, which like VirtualBox has a very low overhead on the host machine:

• Virtual PC 2007, and the SP for Vista, Windows 2008 support

With differencing disks you can handle virtual machine branching, see Andrew Cornell's great article for details:

• Use Virtual PC's Differencing Disks to your Advantage

Answer 8

I'm running Windows 2008 Server 32-bit as my development machine as well as my testing box. I only have 1 computer Server 64-bit doesn't run stable on my machine as the networking card drops out constantly (wireless) and the graphics performance is terrible.

Thanks for you suggestions.

Answer 9

Virtualbox seems be faster than Virtual PC when/while the addons are not installed. If the host computer has low RAM (like 512 MB ) and the guest OS is windows then Virtual PC is better as Virtualbox gives many not enough memory errors in that case.

Answer 10

I prefer using Virtualbox. I've read some tests, which said it is faster than VirtualPC, and also it has got interesting function - integration with the main OS. Although in Virtual PC it is possible to simply drag and drop files between systems but on Virtual pc you can't run x64 bit guest OS.

Answer 11

Looks like VMWare upped the anti with a new free solution. VMWare ESXi - http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

Looks a bit heavy duty but I'll try it out as well. In a virtual machine of course.