Alternative to Parallels/VirtualBox?

[timconsidine]

I have tended to use VirtualBox or Parallels for local deployment of VMs. Parallels is really slick and maybe worth the purchase/subscription. I find VirtualBox clunky (but works for sure).

Just wondering if others here use/recommend other apps ?

[luckow]

@timconsidine nope. In the cases where I needed virtualization magic on my local computer, I used Virtualbox, and it worked. Local development works with tools like docker, and the rest is cloud based. But I remember https://opennebula.io/ as a tool from some of my devops teammates

[girish]

I know @sirspudd uses virt-manager for managing VMs , have no experience with it myself.

[MooCloud_Matt]

@timconsidine
if you use Windows, just go with Hyper-V it's just the most optimized and is included with the OS.
or WSL can do a lot in the latest v2 update, with even docker desktop support.

if you are on Linux, and you want a UI, just go for the simple Gnome Boxes, that use QEMU.

This is all valid if you don't wanna go with a professional solution, but for homelabs and testing, they are pretty good.

[luckow]

Oh, i forgot: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve Maybe it's worth taking a look

[fbartels]

@timconsidine the products you mentioned make me think that you're running on MacOS. In which case https://github.com/lima-vm/lima could be what you're looking for.

I'm using https://github.com/abiosoft/colima to run docker containers locally, which is based on Lima.

[timconsidine]

@fbartels good observation !
I have small Linux boxes, but my primary end-user environment is Mac.
So for this topic Mac system is good.

I'm interested to try Proxmox sometime and others.

I'm using Parallels Desktop on a Mac Mini M1 because (at the time anyway) Virtualbox didn't support M1 chip. Must check again.

Parallels also offer 'Parallels RAS' which is interesting to support 'desktop as a service'. But server component is Windows only (and for me no on-premise Windows device) or install on Azure or AWS (which is not my preferred direction).

EDIT : Lima sure looks interesting and Lima/Colima installs via Homebrew - sweet !

[mehdi]

@fbartels This may be a dumb question, but what's the point of Lima / Colima compared to simply the official Docker for Mac setup ?

[fbartels]

@mehdi said in Alternative to Parallels/VirtualBox?:

compared to simply the official Docker for Mac setup ?

Docker changed the licensing of Docker Desktop a while ago making it no longer free to use for larger organisations.