Summary: Virtual machine software has made it easier for businesses to build, scale, and optimize their virtual machines. Find the best software you can use for this purpose below.
Manually managing on-premises infrastructure makes it difficult for businesses to scale and optimize them. Further, managing these workloads requires a huge maintenance cost. However, virtual machines have made it easier to manage the physical infrastructure and resolve these issues.
With Virtual Machine for Windows, you can divide your physical servers, allocate resources, and easily optimize and scale them when required. Virtual machines allow you to emulate the functionalities of one physical computer on another.
Additionally, these machines can also be used to test and deploy applications on your cloud environment. If you want to learn more about how virtual machines work, read more.
Virtualization is the procedure through which a single computer component like processor and storage are divided into virtual computers, called virtual machines. Virtual machine software mimics the features of physical hardware for running multiple VMs on an individual physical machine. With virtualization, business can effectively manage their resources and improve their ROI.
Managing physical servers needs electricity, a lot of storage space, and maintenance. However, through virtualization, your hardware infrastructure is divided into virtual machines that can be managed via software. Therefore, making it easier to manage and optimize your hardware infrastructure through the web.
A virtual machine is a type of machine that emulates the features of a physical server or computer. These machines are often defined as “Guest” and the physical machine on which they run is called the “host”.
Each virtual machine has its own operating system and applications running on an individual physical machine. The virtual machine does not directly interact with the physical server. Rather, it requires software known as a “hypervisor” to interact with the physical hardware.
This hypervisor helps in allocating computing resources like processors, memory, storage, etc., to every virtual machine. Further, it keeps virtual machines separate from each other, so they do not interfere with other virtual machines.
There are several virtual machines that you can use for dividing and managing your physical infrastructure. Here are the top VMs you can consider for this purpose:
VMware ESXi bare metal hypervisor is used to divide a physical server into various virtual machines to easily manage and optimize them.
With it, you can consolidate hardware resources, improve workload efficiency, manage workload from a centralized database, and migrate them to the cloud environment. It also offers built-in VM management tools to develop and provision your virtual machines.
VMware ESXi License: Proprietary
CPU Usage Host/Guest: Amazon Linux 2, AlmaLinux OS 9.x, macOS 10.12.x, etc.
Features of VMware ESXi
Pros and Cons of VMware ESXi
Free Trial: Not available
Price of VMware ESXi: Free plan available | Paid plan starts from INR 16,327.37/CPU/year
VirtualBox is an x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization software designed for enterprise and home usage to develop and manage virtual machines. You can use it to run various operating systems together, develop and test several-node networked services on VMs, and consolidate different VMs into a single host.
Virtualbox License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
CPU Usage Host/Guest: Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, OpenSolaris
Features of Virtualbox
Virtualbox Pros and Cons
Free Trial: NA | Free to use
Price: It’s a free virtual machine software for Windows
VMware Workstation Pro and Workstation Player are VM software that you can use to create and manage your virtual machines. Once created, you can easily transfer files and data among various guests and hosts.
This software has made it easier to run complicated local virtual environments and also simulate various operating systems, clouds, platforms, etc., from a single solution.
License: Proprietary and commercial license
CPU Usage Host/Guest: Windows 8, Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, OpenSUSE, etc.
Features of VMware Workstation
Pros and Cons of VMware Workstation
Free Trial: NA | Free virtual machine software for Windows
Price of VMware Workstation Pro and Workstation Player: Free for personal use | Paid for commercial use, starting from INR 16,330.68
Microsoft Hyper-V is a hardware virtualization product to develop and run virtual machines. Hyper-V can help you with establishing virtual cloud environment, developing and testing applications, allocating resources for virtualization, creating applications backup, etc.
Microsoft Hyper-V License: Proprietary
CPU Usage Host/Guest: FreeBSD, Windows, Linux
Features of Microsoft Hyper-V
Pros and Cons of Microsoft Hyper-V
Free Trial: NA | Free to use
Price of Microsoft Hyper-V: It’s a free virtual machine
VMware Fusion Pro and Fusion Player are virtual machine software to run VMs with different operating systems like Windows and Linux in the host macOS operating system.
With it, you can test and develop apps for the Arm ecosystem via arm64 VMS on Apple Silicon. VMware Fusion Unity View Mode lets you use several OS simultaneously in your virtual machines.
VMware Fusion License: Subscription based
VMware Fusion CPU Usage Host/Guest: macOS 13.0.x, macOS 12.0.x, Windows, Linux, and NetWare
Features of VMware Fusion
Pros and Cons of VMware Fusion
Free Trial: 30 days
Price of VMware Fusion: No free available | Paid plan starts from INR 12,226.87
QEMU virtual emulator is used to create and emulate various virtual environments. This free virtual machine software lets you run multiple operating systems of one machine on different virtual machines. It can also run applications for Linux, BSD, Windows, and similar supported architecture.
License of QEMU: GNU General Public License
QEMU CPU Usage Host/Guest: Linux, Mac, Windows, Open BSD, FreeBSD, Solaris host OS
Features of QEMU
Pros and Cons of QEMU
Free Trial: NA | Free virtualization software for windows
QEMU Price: Free to use
Gnome Boxes, a free virtual machine software that helps manage virtual machines that are running locally and remotely.
With it, you can create boxes for all the virtual machines to manage them, troubleshoot them, or revert them to the previous position. Gnome Boxes also lets you give an individual name to the virtual machine to search quickly.
Gnome Boxes License: GNU LGPL-2.1+
Gnome Boxes CPU Usage Host/Guest: CentOS Stream, Fedora, Debian, Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.
Features of Gnome Boxes
Pros and Cons of Gnome Boxes
Free Trial: Available
Gnome Boxes Price: Free to use
Red Hat Virtualization helps in automating, managing, and upgrading the virtualized workloads. With it, you can manage workloads for resource intensive and important applications that are developed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM.
You can use this software to virtualize all your resources, procedures, and applications from a single solution.
Red Hat Virtualization License: Open source
Red Hat Virtualization CPU Usage Host/Guest: Linux and Windows.
Features of Red Hat Virtualization
Pros and Cons of Red Hat Virtualization
Free Trial: 60 days
Price of Red Hat Virtualization: Price is available on request on its official website
Oracle VM is developed to build and optimize the performance of several Linux, Oracle Solaris, and Windows workloads.
It comes with capabilities for configuring server pools, managing storage repositories, managing resources and workloads, cloning and migrating virtual machines, etc. Oracle VM can also create snapshots of virtual machines to bring them back to the previous state.
Oracle VM License: Oracle VM Server, GPLv2
CPU Usage Host/Guest: Windows, Linux, Solaris host OS
Oracle VM Features
Pros and Cons of Oracle VM
Free Trial: Free virtualization software for windows
Price of Oracle VM: Free virtual machine for windows
Microsoft Free Account Virtual Machine is a VM software that lets you test and run your virtual machines. With it, you can manage almost 1500 VM/hour/month with the free azure account.
Further, it supports Windows Server 2012+, Ubuntu 16.04 LTs, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS host OS to manage VMs.
Microsoft Free Account Virtual Machine License: Proprietary
CPU Usage Host/Guest: Windows and Linux
Features of Microsoft Free Account Virtual Machine
Pros and Cons of Microsoft Virtual Machine
Free Trial: Not available
Price of Microsoft Free Account Virtual Machine: Microsoft Azure users can use it for free
Azure Linux Virtual Machine Pricing: Starts from INR 0.33/hour
Virtualization Manager is a VM monitoring and management software to boost and optimize VM performance. It offers AppStack™ dashboard, to view and manage relationship between multiple servers, applications, data stores, and hosts.
Some of the major features you get with it include VM sprawl management, optimal VM size and placement, virtual migration cost calculator, VSAN performance monitoring, snapshot monitoring, etc.
Virtualization Manager License: Subscription and perpetual licensing
Virtualization Manager CPU Usage Host/Guest: Windows
Features of Virtualization Manager
Pros and Cons of Virtualization Manager
Free Trial: 30 days
Price of Virtualization Manager: No free plan available | Paid plan offered with one-time payment of INR 1,40,842.33
To set up a virtual machine in Windows, follow the given steps:
Step 1: Install and configure virtualization software for windows
Step 2: Choose the operating system that will work on your virtual machine.
Step 3: Download the .iso file of the operating system that will run in the virtual machine
Step 4: Configure the settings for your virtual machine and click on “Create”
Step 5: After that, your virtual machine will be created
Step 6: Next, add the .iso file of the operating system to load the operating system
Step 7: Once done, the created virtual machine will start working on your selected operating system.
Consolidating your physical infrastructure into a virtual environment can help you to easily scale and optimize your physical resources in a hassle-free manner.
Based on a detailed comparison, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtualbox, and Oracle VM are the best virtual machines that you can use for managing your physical hardware.
FAQs
Some of the best virtual machines that you can run on Windows are Oracle VirtualBox 7.x, VMware Workstation Player 17, Microsoft Hyper-V, Hardware emulation, etc.
Yes, there are multiple Windows virtual machines that you can use for free including Oracle VM, Microsoft Free Account Virtual Machine, Red Hat Virtualization, etc.
Yes, you can get a virtual machine for free through a free virtual machine platform. There are several options like Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM, and Virtualbox that you can use to build and manage your virtual machines.
Yes, VMs running on different versions of Windows need valid licenses. Whether you build a new VM or transport your PC to virtual machine, you require a different Windows license to use a VM.
To create a virtual machine for window 10, you can use virtual machine software. Some of the best software you can use includes VirtualBox,VMware, Hyper-V, VMware Workstation, Parallels Desktop, and so on.
First, develop a new VM and choose an OS like windows 10. After that, configure and start the virtual machine. Next, install the operating system on the machine. After that, your virtual machine will be activated.
There are several virtual machines that you can use for dividing and operating your physical servers. Some of the best machines you can consider for this purpose include VMware Workstation Player, VirtualBox, Parallels Desktop, QEMU, etc.
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