Hypervisors
A hypervisor (or virtual machine monitor, VMM) is a computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
This page is intended to be a place for me to 'review' these hypervisors. If it's listed here, I've used it.
Type 1 / Bare-Metal Hypervisors
Microsoft Hyper-V
- Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V
- Product/project page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization
- Overall rating: 🌝⛺️ (2/5 random emoji)
Hyper-V is powerful, easy to use, and available to anyone running a modern version of Windows. It's a bit of a resource hog and though it's possible, I've never seen anyone run it on top of Windows install without a GUI, which just makes the overhead worse.
Proxmox VE
- Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxmox_Virtual_Environment
- Product/project page: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
- Overall rating: 🌂🚠⚡️ (3/5 random emoji)
Powerful and with a rich set of features, Proxmox VE is a solid choice in hypervisors. It's popular among the homelab crowd, too.
VMware ESXi
- Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ESXi
- Product/project page: https://www.vmware.com/products/esxi-and-esx.html
- Overall rating: 🍤💎💹 (3/5 random emoji)
ESXi is a very powerful hypervisor with a low overhead. Advanced features require expensive licenses, however.
XCP-ng
- Wikipedia page: NA
- Product/project page: https://xcp-ng.org/
- Overall rating: 📲🍕⏰ (3/5 random emoji)
XCP-ng is an open-source version of XenServer (now Citrix Hypervisor), which makes use of the Xen Project hypervisor. It's very powerful, has a small overhead, and has many advanced features out-of-the-box.
Type 2 / Userspace Hypervisors
Oracle VM VirtualBox
- Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox
- Product/project page: https://www.virtualbox.org/
- Overall rating: ☂♑️👺↩️👻 (5/5 random emoji)
VBox is my go-to solution for running VMs on my workstations. Whether I'm working in Windows or Linux, it's easy to use and works reliably.
QEMU
- Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU
- Product/project page: https://www.qemu.org/
- Overall rating: 🚌⏰ (2/5 random emoji)
QEMU is powerful because it can do CPU emulation, which sets it apart from the other hypervisors on this page. Unfortunately, it's ridiculously difficult to setup and use. I suggest using a GUI wrapper if possible, or to launch it from a script rather than a single command. This way, once you have the settings workable, you can save them for later use.
VMware Workstation
- Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_Workstation
- Product/project page: https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro.html
- Overall rating: ❄️😋🎂 (3/5 random emoji)
VMware Workstation is fairly easy to use, but also feature-limited. It's able to run VMs, but like most commercial software, it doesn't play well with others.