A list of virtualization software and solutions as a starting point for replacing VMware products.
The solutions listed here offer similar functions to VMware virtualization products. Whether they are really suitable as an alternative depends heavily on individual requirements.
- VMware Workstation Pro - Build and run Windows, Linux and BSD virtual machines on a Windows or Linux desktop.
- VMware Workstation Player - Run multiple operating systems as virtual machines on your Windows or Linux desktop (Free for Personal Use).
- VMware Fusion Pro - Run Windows, Linux, containers, Kubernetes and more in virtual machines (VMs) on MacOS.
- VMware Fusion Player - Run Windows, Linux, containers, Kubernetes and more in virtual machines (VMs) on MacOS (Free for Personal Use).
- GNOME Boxes - Application of the GNOME Desktop Environment, used to access virtual systems. Boxes uses the QEMU, KVM, and libvirt virtualization technologies.
- Parallels Desktop for Mac (Standard/Pro/Business Edition) - Run Windows, Linux, or macOS in virtual machines on a Mac.
- Microsoft Hyper-V - Lets you run multiple operating systems as virtual machines on Windows 10/11.
- Oracle VM VirtualBox (Enterprise) - Popular open source, cross-platform, virtualization software.
- UTM - UTM is a full featured system emulator and virtual machine host for iOS and macOS. [docs]
- Virtualbox - General-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware, targeted at server, desktop and embedded use.
- Virtualbox with KVM Backend - KVM Backend for VirtualBox (has to be build from source).
- VMTek - Mac virtualization platform. Run multiple instances and versions of macOS, Linux and other operating systems side-by-side on a Mac.
- VMware vSphere - VMwares virtualization platform.
- VMware Cloud Foundation - vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSAN Enterprise, NSX Ent Plus (nur Netzwerk), Aria Suite Term Enterprise, Aria Ops for Networks ENT, HCX Enterprise, SDDC Manager, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid und vCenter Server Standard.
- VMware vSphere Foundation - vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCenter Standard, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid und Aria Suite Standard.
- VMware vSphere Essentials Plus - Server virtualization solution for data center consolidation and enhanced application availability (vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) and vCenter Standard).
- VMware vSphere Standard - All-in-one solution for small businesses (vSphere Essentials Plus and vCenter Essentials).
- VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus - ESX Enterprise Plus with vCenter Standard (basically without VSAN, Kubernetes and VCF Operations).
- Harvester - Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution built for bare metal servers usingopen-source technologies including Linux, KVM, Kubernetes, KubeVirt, and Longhorn. [docs]
- Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager - Open source KVM environment and oVirt-based management with support from Oracle. [docs]
- Proxmox VE - Open-source server management platform for virtualization. It integrates the KVM hypervisor and Linux Containers (LXC). [docs, forum, endoflife.date]
- Nutanix AHV - HCI-optimized Hypervisor included with every Nutanix node [docs]
- Nutanix Community Edition - Free version of Nutanix AOS intended for internal business operations and non-production use only.
- Scale Computing HyperCore - Type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor
- Softiron VM Squared - KVM-based hypervisor
- StorMagic SvHCI - Based on open-source Linux KVM/QEMU technology and Open vSwitch, with storage virtualization provided by SvSAN. [docs]
- Ubuntu LXD - Open-source solution for managing virtual machines and system containers. LXD provides both KVM-based VMs and system containers based on LXC.
- VergeOS - VergeOS is an ultraconverged infrastructure (UCI) solution that integrates virtualization, storage, and networking into a single data center operating system. [docs, download]
- Virtuozzo Hybrid Server - Bare-metal virtualization solution that includes container virtualization, KVM-based virtual machines, software-defined storage. It runs on top of VzLinux, a RHEL-based Linux distribution. [docs]
- Citrix Hypervisor - High-performance hypervisor optimized for virtual app and desktop workloads and based on the Xen Project hypervisor [deprecated]
- Vates Virtualization Stack - Complete and fully open source virtualization stack.
- XCP-ng - User-friendly, high-performance virtualization solution, developed collaboratively for unrestricted features and open-source accessibility. [docs, forum, endoflife.date]
- XenServer (formerly Citrix Hypervisor) - Server virtualization platform, with all the capabilities required to create and manage a virtual infrastructure. XenServer is optimized for both Windows and Linux virtual servers. [docs]
- Azure Stack HCI - Azure Stack HCI is a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that VMs or containers and their storage. [docs]
- BSD bhyve - hypervisor/virtual machine manager available on FreeBSD and illumos. [docs]
- Canonical MicroCloud - Small-scale clouds optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. [docs]
- Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V - The Hyper-V role in Windows Server lets you create a virtualized computing environment where you can create and manage virtual machine. [docs]
- Triton SmartOS - Converged Container and Virtual Machine Hypervisor [downloads, docs]
- VMware vCenter - Server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments (part of VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation).
- Apache CloudStack - Open-source software system designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. [docs, downloads]
- ManageIQ - Open source management platform for Hybrid IT. It can manage small and large environments, and supports multiple technologies such as virtual machines, public clouds and containers. [docs, downloads]
- OpenNebula - Open Source Cloud Computing Platform to build and manage Enterprise Clouds. It supports multiple virtualization technologies, e.g. VMware, KVM and also LXC and Firecracker. [docs, downloads, forum]
- OpenStack - Cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed and provisioned through APIs with common authentication mechanisms.
- OpenStack Marketplace - List of several openstack distros & appliances
- Triton DataCenter - Open source platform that offers unified management of containers and virtualization. [docs, downloads]
- Virtualizor - Web based VPS Control Panel which a user can deploy and manage VPS on servers with a single click. Virtualizor supports KVM, Xen, OpenVZ, Proxmox, Virtuozzo, LXC, etc with an inbuilt hourly billing system. [docs]
- VMmanager - Platform for virtualization management. The platform allows to manage multiple clusters, create virtual machines, install OS, and run scripts. [docs]
- Xen Orchestra - Management interface for XenServer/XCP-ng [docs]
- VMware Cloud on AWS - Managed VMware by Amazon.
- VMware on Azure - Managed VMware by Microsoft.
- Oracle Cloud VMware Solution - VMware cloud environment based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
Contributing guidelines can be found here.
This list is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 Generic License. Terms of the license are summarized https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/.
