Best Free Hypervisors in 2024

hey everyone I'm Brandon Lee and welcome back to virtualization out 2 today we're diving into a Hot Topic in the virtualization landscape and Technology landscape in general in case you haven't heard which is doubtful VMware esxi free edition is no longer available and many are searching for a free hypervisor solution that will allow them to not only experiment and run software and apps in their home lab environment but also organization worldwide are looking at their options following the broadcom purchase of VMware and the absolutely tectonic massive changes that they have made and continue to make

in this episode we're going to explore what I think are the best free hypervisors available for your home labs and for production outside of the VMware vsphere ecosystem so stick around [Music] so rest in peace VMware esxi free edition uh it's definitely a a virtualization hypervisor to remember but let's now pivot to the topic at hand let's look at the first free hypervisor that you may not be familiar with well first up is nanic Community Edition now many do not realize this but new tanx has a free edition of its Enterprise hypervisor that I have

covered in a blog post recently uh new tanx Community Edition has very few limitations uh in fact way fewer limitations than VMware free edition you can build up to a four node cluster with the free edition of nanic and this is something you can sign up for download for totally free also something that I wrote about recently that I I feel is a key part of what you want to migrate to is that nanx has a move utility and that's what it's called the nanic move utility and this nanic move utility is a great tool

that has the Enterprise polish as well uh just like the hypervisor you can simply add the source of your move and the destination of your move and it has all the integration and automation that you would expect from and with VMware VSS spere environments and and it allows you to move VMS flawlessly uh in fact it will automate the entire move process it will uh create the snapshots and V Vere it will pull the data over then it will automate the process of shutting down the source virtual machine and bringing up the target virtual machine

inside of nanic so uh has that automation so that's something that you want to think about not only how awesome is the hypervisor that I want to go to how easily can I get there so it's a super slick solution and I think it's a really great one to have on the list now I know many May disagree with me to have a Enterprise solution like nanx on the list it's not free and open source however I think it's a really great solution to check out and also I think we will see huge adoption of

nanic in the SMB and midmarket now with VMware going the way that it has um so spinning up a nanic and environment at home is going to be a great way to build skills with nanic if you've never had your hands on it before getting that in your home lab and you can do that totally free and the nanic move utility is also totally free well next on the list we have one that needs no introduction especially in the home lab Community it's proxmox ve uh proxmox is a robust and very scalable Solution that's built

on the free and open source hyper visor konel virtual machine or kbm and it's gaining massive popularity for uh the features the capabilities including clustering live migration failover uh snapshots uh also with proxmox one of the cool things that you can do and I've blogged about this uh and created videos about the free HCI solution called Seth and this integration is built right into the proxmox interface you can spin up a seph HCI cluster and it has all of those features built in so that you can run hypercon converge storage on top of your proxmox

cluster now one of the hurdles I see with proxo especially migrating virtual machines from VMware is that there's not really a slick utility that is provided by proxmox to do this uh you'll see a lot of processes out there that are successful however you must export your virtual machines and VMware to ovf files you've got to copy those obf files over to your proxmox server you've got to run a con a conversion of those discs before you spin those up as new virtual machines uh so I love the solution however I I do see that

as a hurdle uh when we look at just the pure context of migrating uh virtual machines it may not be for the faint of heart especially when I think about migrating dozens or even hundreds of virtual machines from VMware to prox mod um that is really going to be uh tricky especially for larger environments however again it is a great solution uh with many great features including a backup solution that comes along with the hypervisor that's a free download so you can potentially go to a free hypervisor free backup software so you you're not tied

to an Enterprise backup solution like we find ourselves being with the VMware vsphere ecosystem system now next on the list is xcp NG now xcp is a really excellent free and open-source project that was started in 2017 by a company called Vates and I will say that xcp and offers perhaps one of the most VMware like management experiences uh when you look at operations and how things are managed and carried out in VMware xcp and uh really sticks closely with that management model uh in fact the company behind xpg Vates uh they provide not only

a hypervisor for free but they provide this management Appliance called Zen Orchestra now Zen Orchestra or XO for short as you'll hear it referred to it's very Venter like in its operation uh and the capabilities that it provides for the environment so you will stand up the hypervisor first and then much like VMR here you're going to stand up your Exo management Appliance on top of the xng host and then it unlocks other features uh that allow you to uh do many really cool things if you're using this for a production environment now one of

the cool things that I think stands out about xcp uh when compared to other Solutions as we've already mentioned it has a built-in migration utility from VMware vsphere here so you can connect xcp or Zen Orchestra to your vcenter server then you can pull over those virtual machines that you want to migrate to your xpg environment and then literally power those up as new virtual machines inside of xcp and that's something that you can do much easier than you can migrating virtual machines uh with proxmox and its solution and it has all the enterpris features

that you would expect built in backup solution just like proxmox so it's kind of an all-in-one all-encompassing solution that I think is going to be a great solution not only for home lab environments but also for production business organization uh scenarios and Enterprise data center next on the list is kubernetes-based hypervisors now the world of kubernetes based hypervisors like cubt and one that is especially wellknown Rancher Harvester those Solutions are are emerging as a uh hypervisor solution that many are giving serious attention to and these platforms offer flexibility and innovation in handling virtual machines alongside

containers really in some ways better than the traditional hypervisors that we've seen in Enterprise data center however one thing I will say about these is they still feel very new kubernetes the underlying technology that powers couvert is a technology that's still not well stood uh in the Enterprise by uh traditional admins and so that in itself is going to add a layer of complexity to that underlying solution for troubleshooting for management life cycle management Etc going from where many are today with VMV sphere some of the more uh traditional open- Source hypervisor Solutions like uh

proxmox xcp and G I think those are going to be safer options instead of diving off into cu and kubernetes based virtualization however you guys may disagree with that and and please do in the comments let me know if you're seeing some really slick Solutions out there utilizing Solutions based on kuvert running on top of kubernetes the last solution that I want to mention is vanilla KVM so we've mentioned KVM based distributions like proxmox actually new tanic was originally built from kbm now for those that prefer a straightforward approach and you don't want to go

with a prepackaged KVM like proxmox or nanic or other KVM based Solutions you can actually roll your own Solution by simply just installing a Linux drro and then adding KVM to that Linux drro so you could pick a a Dr like a buntu Debian or one of the others that you want to make use of with the solution add KVM and then you can start running virtual machines but with something like this you're not going to have all the built-in tools that you're used to with something like proxmox on the free and open source side

of kbm or nanx on the interprise clo source side of KVM those are very slick they've they've got maturity uh they have those uh really nice bells and whistles that already built in so when you roll your own KVM and install that package uh you're going to not have a lot of those fancy tools and dashboards that you may be used to now there are a lot of great open- source Solutions out there for dashboards and for other Integrations with KVM don't get me wrong however just keep that in mind that it is something that

U maybe will be a challenge as opposed to going with one of the pre-built KVM Solutions well keep in mind these are only a few of the free hypervisor Solutions out there uh the community that I'm seeing and the conversations that I'm seeing happening remains vibrant and everyone is is being extremely resourceful as a look at options so whether you're a veteran or new to the Enterprise virtualization scene there's no doubt a solution out there for you and for your organization don't forget to like share and subscribe for more insights and tutorials got a lot

of great content coming your way and join the conversation our Forums on the VHC Forums on virtualization howto or in the comments for this video well I'm Brandon Lee please do stay safe out there keep on home labbing and I will see you guys on the next video