VMWare equivalent [closed]
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1032305
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I need to do testing on clean machines frequently so i need some kind of virtual machine emulator which can load and run clean OS images.
Do you know any recommended freeware or low cost emulator ?
Thanks,
Adi Barda
Solution
I have been using VirtualBox for a while - http://www.virtualbox.org/ - and it works a treat
OTHER TIPS
Everyone seems to be suggesting VirtualBox but, in my opinion, you can't beat VMWare at the virtualization game.
I would get a copy of VMWare Player (it's free for non-commercial use and you'd be hard pressed to find one cheaper than that), then use this web site here to create yourself a virtual machine to whatever specification you need.
I run heaps of images under XP (and one XP image under Debian) and it really is easy to set up. Early editions of the Linux VMWare required you to re-configure the software whenever the kernel changed but this is now an automatic process.
We're using Xen paravirtualization, and it's working very well. It's the same technology used by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to run your virtual machine images on their physical hosts. It only costs you 0.5-3.0% of your CPU cycles too.
What exactly are your needs?
I would try Vagrant which uses VirtualBox. It makes it really easy and quick to create and destroy boxes as you need them.
I've found it to be really amazing for getting a new clean development environment up and running. Once you get it going it makes switching, testing, creating, sharing and trashing development environments real easy.
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 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).
VirtualBox is also a good alternative.
I realize this has been well-answered already, but I'd like to add a couple of notes about VirtualBox: (1) In my experience, it is much faster than VMware when running as a Linux host, and (2) the snapshot features have been greatly improved in recent versions (the comprehensive snapshot functionality is what kept me in VMware for a long time.)
VirtualBox is a great virtual machine solution.
I'm a big fan of VirtualBox as well. The OSE is free and runs really well.
VMWare is nice because it's incredibly robust, especially the server edition. With the server edition, you can run all off your VM's of one machine and access them at any time by browsing to VMWare's web GUI. This is a nice feature that I've used time and time again.
I would say that if you're doing just testing/playing around, I'd go with VirtualBox over VMWare.
