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Virtualisation List

Networking

Hypervisors and virtual machines

Ontop of the great VMware resources below there are other hypervisors for running containers and virtual machines.

Hypervisors are classified as Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisors. Type 1 are often known as bare metal hypervisors. It's installed on bare metal, e.g. it is not installed as an application on top of an operating system. A Type 2 hypervisor is an application which is installed on the operating system. Type 2 Hypervisors can be SLOW. In most reviews and experience, they perform at roughly 30-40% hardware capability. That means an Guest Operating Systems in a virtual machine hosted on a Type 2 hyperviosor will likely perform at best like it has an 800 MHz CPU if you have 2 GHz physical CPU.

If you use a Type 1 Hypervisor, you get much better performance (based on experience and reviews) typically get 80-90% hardware capability - so that same virtual machines hosted on the same 2 GHz CPU should operate more like it has a 1.6 GHz CPU instead of 800 Mhz.

Here are some type 1 and type 2 hypervisors.

Type 1 (Bare Metal Hypervisors)

Proxmox - A Free version of the commercial Proxmox hypervisor
Nutanix CE - A free version of the Nutanix HCI platform
Oracle VM Server - Commercial Type 1 hypervisor
XCP-ng - Based on Xen Server - Available on GitHub.
Citrix Hypervisor - Originally based on Xen Server. Commercial version by Citrix.
Microsoft Windows Server 2019 - Hyper-V can be enabled as a role in Windows Server. This is a Type 1 hypervisor. - Available for free if a Student of The Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server - Not to be confused with Windows Server. This is a Type 1 Hypervisor, and is just server core Hyper-V with no GUI. - Available for free if a Student of The Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Microsoft Windows 10 Client Hyper-V - Hyper-V can be enabled in Windows 10 Pro and above. This is a Type 1 Hypervisor. - Available for free if a Student of The Department of Computer Science and Technology.
VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) - Available for free, or full version - Available for free if a Student of The Department of Computer Science and Technology.
KVM/QEmu - KVM is built into the linux kernel, just like Hyper-V in Windows

There are many frontends / management tools for KVM, including but not limited to

furthermore, if you're system supports VT-d you can pass through your video card, or other pci device to use within your vm

GPU Passthrough

Type 2

Oracle Virtualbox - A Free alternative to VMware Workstation for all platforms
VMware Fusion for Apple Mac - Type 2 Hypervisor for Apple Mac - Available for free if a Student of The Department of Computer Science and Technology.
VMware Workstation - Type 2 Hypervisor for Linux and Windows - Available for free if a Student of The Department of Computer Science and Technology.
VMware Player - Type 2 Hypervosor for Linux and Windows - Available for free if a Student of The Department of Computer Science and Technology.
Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac - Type 2 Hypervisor for Mac.

Andrew Hancock, Department of Computer Science & Technology - Systems

Andrew is the VMware Specialist in Computer Science & Technology, responsible for the VMware architecture, watering & feeding the Computer Science & Technology VMware vSphere infrastructure. (based on VMware vSphere). He also has a long list of VMware and Virtualisations articles, a passionate VMware Technical Architect, and VMware vExpert Pro. His articles are reproduced here for your reading pleasure. If you want to discuss anything VMware, then ask him! He will only be too happy to oblige.

Hancock's VMware Half Hour HOW TO Video Series

In this series, which compliments the written articles above, Andy Hancock demonstrates "HOW TO" on a variety of topics. All these videos are based on the previous written content at Experts Exchange.

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