A continuously growing and flourishing business demands a lot of crucial things that must be fulfilled to keep pace. When specifically talking about the operating system for your business, this pace can call for an updated processing unit or a high storage capacity because a single server would not be able to work beyond its limit. Deploying multiple servers for this particular reason can not only cost you a hefty amount but also the chance of uncertainty and inefficiency are also tagged along with it. Do not panic just yet, because technology has advanced enough to get you out of this trouble with the help of virtualization software that enables a single server to accommodate multiple operating systems and applications without any glitches. Apart from cost-effectiveness and greater efficiency, they are also capable of dividing the resources of a single operating system into different virtual machines. This resource division also ensures performance perseverance so that it is never compromised. The provision of encapsulation and the ability to move virtual machines as easily as copy-pasting files make the usage of virtualization software smooth, accessible, and untroubled. This unchallenged transfer of virtual machines gives users hardware independence as well. It gives you the freedom of testing different software and operating systems without the addition of any hardware. You can eliminate 12 physical boxes and manage their functional capabilities on a single system. Most importantly, it ensures the safety and security of your data by providing several firewalls and uploading data at many different places.

To ensure sustained productivity at business, you must not compromise on your computing needs. For this reason, we have researched, selected, and discussed the top 6 free and open-source virtualization software that will ensure you run a smooth and successful business.

Oracle VirtualBox

Oracle VirtualBox is freely available, high-performance, and fully packed with loads of features. This powerful, open-source, and cross-platform tool is available for corporate and even household use. This software helps you with your challenges by providing you support with the drag-and-drop function. Easy access to clipboards, shared folders, and the availability of seamless mode make VB a viable solution for users. As a host, it can support 4 operating systems, teleportation, SMP, VMs transportation, easy switch between cloud and hosts, and public API. The technical team for the VB constantly comes up with new releases, helps users with bug fixes and other technicalities, and adds up new features so that this community-based software stays on the top of the list.

Get it now from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Linux KVM

KVM is a kernel-based virtual machine that is built into your Linux distro and enables your Linux system to host different guests or virtual machines. KVM was developed in the year 2006 and after 1 year it was incorporated into the mainline Linux kernel. Since it has become part of the kernel, that is why you wouldn’t have to put extra effort into the maintenance when new features, advancements, or bug fixes are deployed. Some remarkable features that differentiate KVM from other tools are security, storage, hardware support, memory management, live migration, resource control, scheduling, scalability, performance, lower latency, and higher prioritization.

Get it now from https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Downloads

Xen Project

Xen project has a unique architecture that ensures the availability of virtualization around the globe. Its versatility, customizability, amazing features, and diversity is accelerating the pace of innovation. Where other software and communities lose pace after a while, Xen Project is going strong and bringing more advancements to the tech world even after 20 years of its development. It provides reliability, flexibility, security, and support to its users. Also, it enhances productivity by providing real-time performance monitoring, virtual-to-virtual conversion, and live migration. Reducing the complexity of several server farms, increasing the utilization of servers, and decreasing the cost can easily be done by incorporating the Xen project. The only drawback is the need for third-party to solve issues related to storage, recovery, backup, and hardware drivers.

Get it now from https://xenproject.org/downloads/

oVirt

It is the project of Red Hat which is available completely free and is open source for the users. Linux distros exhibit perfect compatibility with this tool because of its easy-to-use and friendly user interface. The main features of the tool are advanced network management, centralized enterprise-grade virtualization, live migration, cloning virtual machines from snapshots, seamless expansion of resources, management of higher latency, oVirt supports, remote logging, and remote crash analysis.

Get it now from https://www.ovirt.org/download/

Proxmox

It is a powerful, free, and open-source platform to help you with container management, high-availability clusters, and virtual machines. Proxmox is capable of meeting the increasing needs of your business by scaling out the storage demands and virtualizing the most difficult applications’ workload. To provide users with maximum security, Proxmox comes with a built-in firewall. It also comes with the open vSwitch that enables you to reduce the virtual network management overhead without compromising the functionality virtual environment. Apart from these, it also has a vibrant culture, storage plugins, and a graphical user interface.

Get it now from https://www.proxmox.com/en/downloads

OpenStack

This rapidly evolving and advancing, open source platform has been challenging other software to keep up and has been backed up by the support of many giants of the tech world. key features of the software are the provision of support to commodity hardware, unlimited storage, no central database, multi-dimensional scalability, node failure agnostic, real-time visibility, and many more.

Get it now from https://www.openstack.org/

Closing Remarks

We can easily conclude that virtualization software can simplify managing your increasing needs and the operating system’s resources without costing you a dime. Apart from that, they enhance mobility, performance, agility, and automation of operations. It also empowers you to control the production, test, and development environment. Also, reducing the number of physical servers reduces power consumption making your organization more sensitive to the environment. We have compiled a list of 6 top, free, and open-source virtualization tools that are perfectly capable of managing your computing needs.