I am mostly fine with either. For some moments, VMWare is better, for other moments, VirtualBox is better

KVM

They're different tools for different jobs.

I use both, and they do their jobs admirably.

Huh? Then what is your purpose in starting this thread?

The poll is basically a duplicate of https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ar-4175705735/

Here's my 2¢:

You often find VMWare® as the driving force behind certain "cloud" service providers. It has excellent central management controls and a pretty good customer-facing control panel. The retail versions are sometimes "hobbled horses" with strange things omitted – sometimes things that you really need. (I don't think their marketing department really understands "retail.") Pricing can be expensive for the editions that run clouds. It has very precise resource-management and throttling capability, good support for graceful recovery from hardware problems, and built-in (IPSec ...) VPN and firewalling, and software load balancing. Because of the "hobbling," I would not select it for "personal" use.

VirtualBox is a completely-free, full-featured monitor backed by one of the largest software corporations in the world – Oracle®. It runs very reliably on everything. But it is really intended for use on individual machines where it allows you to run multiple operating systems on that one machine. I highly recommend it if you're interested in "testing the waters" of the Linux world while keeping your [Windows] existing machine unchanged. It has a very clean GUI interface, and many preloaded configurations for hosting various Linux and Windows® versions.

KVM is a virtual machine monitor that is specific to Linux and usually included with it or directly installable. It takes a little getting used to, but it is a reliable solution for use in "server-style" computers with various advanced features. Most commonly, it is the core technology used by other Linux software packages which are directly targeted to various specific use-cases.

All of them are mature and work very well on modern hardware. (Which now provide direct CPU hardware support for virtualization.)

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