Best Free Hypervisors of 2024

VirtualBox is a powerful virtualization product that supports both x86 and Intel64 architectures. It can be used at home as well as in an enterprise environment. VirtualBox is a high-performance, feature-rich product that enterprises can use. It is also free to download as Open Source Software under GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2. For more information, see "About VirtualBox". VirtualBox currently runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh. It supports a wide range of guest operating systems, including Windows (NT 4.0), 2000, XP and Server 2003), Windows (7, Windows 8, Windows 10), DOS/Windows (2.4, 2.6 and 3.x), Solaris and OpenSolaris (OS/2 and OpenBSD), and Solaris (2.4, 2.6 and 3.x). VirtualBox is actively being developed and released with regular releases. It has an ever-growing list of features, supported guest OS systems and platforms. VirtualBox is a community effort that is supported by a dedicated company.

QEMU is an open-source machine emulator and virtualizer. Run operating systems on any machine, on any supported platform. Run programs for another Linux/BSD target on any supported architecture. KVM and Xen virtual machine with native performance.

KVM is a full virtualization solution that runs Linux on x86 hardware and includes virtualization extensions (Intel VT, AMD-V). It includes a loadable kernel module, called kvm.ko that provides the core virtualization infrastructure, and a processor-specific module, kvm.intel.ko. KVM allows you to run multiple virtual machines that run unmodified Linux and Windows images. Each virtual machine is equipped with private virtualized hardware such as a network card and disk, graphics adapter, and so on. KVM is open-source software. As of 2.6.20, the kernel component of KVM is part of mainline Linux. Mainline QEMU includes the userspace component of KVM as of 1.3.

ProxmoxVE is an open-source platform that enables all-inclusive enterprise virtualization. It tightly integrates KVM hypervisor, LXC containers and software-defined storage. It also offers networking functionality and easy management of high availability clusters with the built-in web interface.