Best Free Hypervisors in 2024 

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KVM as in Nutanix AHV or KVM as in Proxmox or KVM as libvirt host or KVM as in Cloudstack or KVM as in Openstack ?

lol why would anyone expect these companies to not rug pull. Only got yourself to blame.

I played for a while with proxmox and I have VirtualBox on my machine for development purposes, but when I need to deploy servers for production, KVM/qemu is the way. So, yeah, I found no other reliable, performant and cheap solution at the same time. Depending on how big the attack surface you want to be, there are tools that help with KVM VMs management.

That's definitely a noble thing to do. However, for most people, it's not an option, as enterprise-grade support is worth the price you pay for these products. Of course, if the vendor decides to jack up the prices so much it's not worth it anymore, that calculation falls apart. But the beautiful thing is: There's always alternatives. Don't like RedHat anymore? They killed CentOS, so now there's the openELA with distributions like RockyLinux, AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux and SUSE Liberty Linux. For a product as big as RHEL or Ubuntu, I can't imagine a situation where you're actually stuck paying their new big asks or doing a big migration to a completely different distribution. Due to the open source nature of these things, there will always be community projects springing up if they decide to fuck their customers over, ready to take over once your old license term expires.

I also use Debian, KVM w/ Virt-Manager and Cockpit. Great Hypervisor. Been using it for a year.

Hmm, I believe your first sentence is missing something, probably 'user' before the period. I doubt you mean that you are a homelab etc environment, or everything in this video being a homelab and production environment, or that you want to comment on everything being a really early homelab etc environment because they patently aren't, and it would make no sense. Anyway, I was a vmware ESX user many years ago, then brought it to the company I worked for around when they went +i roughly, then moved completely on to greener pastures (software development) and was fairly happy with all that jazz being someone elses problem except when it in some way touched my corner more directly (don't virtualize and move my f'ing test server off the hardware I ordered for it tyvm IT kahuna - it's MY test server, if I need you to touch it, I'll send an email specifically asking you to, with God on CC, lol). Now, years later, I'm "medically retired" and live in a home where screaming racks of servers wouldn't be appreciated, but I also have time on my hands to muck around with whatever I want again, so since VmWare went the way of the Dodo for home users, I'm going to give xcp-ng a try, it seems to best fit my usecase, but I just have to try the windows server DCE virtualization thing first if I can without it costing an arm, leg, kidney, eyeball and lung. I need windows anyway, I've been a .NET dev for aeons, I don't feel the need to learn a new way to walk when I know how to do it one way.

They dont care about anything but their established whale clients, they are juicing vmware which makes sense moneywise but it makes me sad bevause i cut my teeth on esxi 5.2

No hypervisor platform has a true backup and recovery solution built in. Sure, basic VM backup and restore works fine on Proxmox and XCP. But what about Guest file restore? What about Application Item Restore for enterprise applications like Active Directory, Exchange, different SQL servers? These integrated backup servers are never a replacement for a modern backup solution like Veeam for example.

@@InterFelix I hear you, a dedicated and trusted backup solution is always a must for a business, especially with database apps you mentioned like AD, SQL, Exchange etc., you're gonna need crash/app consistency support with to quiesce the guest's file system (if supported) and etc., but it really depends on the business, their RTO/RPOs, and if they really even need that. Small offices whose data stays relatively static can even get away with just right-clicking "Export" in Hyper-V every so often on their 2 or 3 VMs, copying for redundancy, testing the exported VMs fire up, and they just have a secondary host for HA in case the host dies. It's not what I would do, but at least there are ways to make things work with Hyper-V for small businesses to get by if they had to, even if you did need app consistency and granularity (i.e. scheduled PowerShell scripts), but with VMware, you're just kinda stuck interacting with their proprietary APIs and using VMFS, their VM export is trash, and their recovery tools are garbage, meaning you automatically need a fancy backup solution just by the using ESXi lol

Hyper-V is also not free anymore. The last free Hyper-V is 2019. The current Windows Server is 2022.

Your AD server should be a VM like all the other servers. It should not be your hypervisor.

In first place VMUG have went up to $210 from $200, so not a big jump in the price. But i wonder if VMUG will be alive in some year or not.

Thank you @copper4eva! They should be fixed now.

Proxmox supports GPU passthrough, so you can give your vm access to the graphics card. If that it what you are referring too.

@ErikBussink great shout on VMUG. I have been an advocate of VMUG advantage...I think it is the best deal in home labs across the board. I am wondering what shakeup we may see with pricing on VMUG. So far I haven't seen anything official. Guessing it is still staying around $200 for now?

@@VirtualizationHowtoI am also a vmug subscriber. I am not sure I will renew come next year since I don’t know if I want to reward Broadcom. Plus from a professional standpoint I don’t know how much I will be working with esxi in the future.

No kidding! That's as laughable as comparing desktop environments without including #1 Windows, and #2 Mac, followed by tinker towns. #1 VMware, #2 Hyper-V, followed by tinker towns.

Kvm itself supports PCI passthru. Try to get a motherboard with good iommu support.

Yes it will work. If you generated your free keys before vmware removed the esxi free they will work. If you only have the software and no keys you will have all features for 60 days only. If by Cisco phones you mean installing call manager I had no success installing it but in vmware. CUCM makes internal verification during installation, and verifies the vmware version you’re using: at least 6.5 for 12.5, 6.7 for 14 and 7 for the latest 15

I really like XCP. Only draw back is the limitation on getting VM tools working on certain distros. Still not widely adopted in the main package maintainers and can be massive faff to install, if installable at all

2TB vdisk limit is a potential showstopper. I have just found a bunch of annoyances with xcp as well such as defaulting to the realtek nic.

Because Hyper-V was free while it was Windows Server 2019.

@@ErikBussink oh... thanks, didn't know they dropped the free edition, now there's just a 60 days trial of the new azure hci solution...

@squalazzo thanks for the call out on the timestamps...fixed them! Hyper-V I think will be a good option for those who have an enterprise agreement. I didn't include in this list as I wanted to truly cover those solutions that were free.

​@VirtualizationHowto The free hyper-v version of windows server is going away. Hyper-v is still free if you're running a windows server.

@bobt-kn2fs just a few days after I put out the video they dropped the new feature...imagine that! However I have already covered in another video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-H1t6hxCoiZw.htmlsi=O6qxqWnn9I-KsS7h cheers!

Are you aware, that Hyper-V is free? :)

@@janpichrtThe 2019 edition ? That has been a while. Better keep using Hypervisor 8 from 2023 in your homelab.

That’s a type 2 hypervisor not type 1 and hyper v 2019 is the last type 1 hypervisor that is EOL in 2029

@@gencwiz2 You may want to check your assumptions before you post.

@@MrPir84free please correct me cause you couldn’t be any more wrong

It also went the same route as ESXi.

Virtualbox is garbage...

Try getting 2.5Gbit and 10Gbit network speeds in Virtualbox - you can't. Proxmox can. Don't get me wrong, virtualbox works OK on Linux, Intel OSX and Windows but it's not exactly high performance

I use VirtualBox because I did not understand over half of what our host explained. I would need to attend a class to have all of the features explained to me. It is like watching a video review of audio gear, and hearing about jitter and transports and pulse code modulation and over-sampling and overhang and zenith angles and diffusers and compression, etc, when you never before heard of those items. With VirtualBox, I was up and running in no time. I am clearly missing out on many features that other hypervisors have. But since I have no idea what those features do, or how to use them, or under what conditions I would have a use for them, I will not blindly jump in to them. It would be like a Windows GUI-only user being seated in front of a Linux bash shell for the first time, and told to read the "man" pages to configure its network. I watched videos for other hypervisors. They all seem to be narrated for people that do not need help; that already understand the myriad of acronyms and features and nuances of the packages. I have found no hypervisor videos for beginners. I would love to learn Proxmox. From watching videos, I can see that it is a great hypervisor. I can also see that the cockpit of an F 22 Raptor is highly advanced. That does not mean that I can plant myself in there and have a clue what to do.

@@NoEgg4u VBox is great for developers. I don't think it recommend for production servers, and VBox is a type 2 hyper visor. That means the hypervisor runs on top of the OS. A type-1 hypervisor loads and runs BEFORE your OS loads and runs - hence the term bare metal. So, this like most things comes down to the right horse for the right course. VBox is fantastic for running some VM's and testing stuff. And with such great (fast) hardware these days, a server probably could be run with VBox. However, any version of windows comes Hyper-V for free (any version beyond home edition), and it is a type-1 hypervisor (bare metal). I used VBox for years, but since windows has free Hyper-V, then I now use that. The advantage of using Hyper-V is that is the same system on your windows desktop, and it is the same version used on server editions of windows. So, you get to learn a server system, one that has transferable market skill value. I have more then once spent a week setting up a VM (windows server + asp.net web server). So, I spent about 1 week setting up that server, installing software, and setting up the asp.net production code, and configuring the web server). I then handed off that VM to the IT department, and they spooled up that VM on their main production server, and it worked without any issues. So, learning Hyper-V is great, since that's what a lot of windows centric companies are using these days. No company going to run VBox for their production servers, since it not a type-1 bare metal server. (which means if the host OS has a issue, then all of the vm's running will and can also have a issue....). It also means those VM's tend to be dependent on the drivers installed on the host OS - and again for production servers, you don't want that. (you need and want the ability to move and spool up the VM's on any computer running Hyper-v).

Watch out everyone, we’ve got a tough guy in the comments!!