Hypervisors and VM tools: Proxmox VE, VMware Workstation Pro, QEMU and Vagrant for reproducible environments.
Proxmox VE is a free, open-source bare-metal virtualization platform based on Debian. It runs KVM virtual machines and LXC containers, with clustering, high availability, ZFS/Ceph storage and scheduled backups, all managed from a web interface.
Desktop hypervisor for Windows and Linux PCs. It runs many VMs side by side, with snapshots, clones, virtual networks, vTPM and the vmrun CLI. Free for commercial, educational and personal use since November 2024, with no licence key. It replaces the discontinued Workstation Player.
QEMU is the open-source machine emulator and virtualizer behind KVM, Proxmox VE and libvirt. It runs VMs at near-native speed with KVM, HVF or WHPX, emulates other CPU architectures, and converts disk images with qemu-img. Free, GPL-2.0.
Vagrant is HashiCorp’s free command-line tool for creating reproducible, disposable virtual machines from a single Vagrantfile. It drives VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Docker or VMware and provisions VMs with shell scripts or Ansible.
