VMWare equivalent [closed]

Question

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?

Answer 1

I have been using VirtualBox for a while - http://www.virtualbox.org/ - and it works a treat

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

Free emulator for Linux:

QEmu and KVM

http://www.qemu.org/

Best I have used.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.