VMware Workstation and Fusion
VMware hypervisors provide the recommended platform for running virtual machines regardless of operating system. Based on testing, they are compatible with all the virtualized functionality offered and have excellent performance.
Versions
The Player version of VMware Workstation is easy to deploy due to its simplicity. It's a free, more stripped-down hypervisor than Workstation Pro, for example, you can't run multiple virtual machines at the same time. However, all versions of VMware are sufficient for running virtual machines of courses in terms of their features.
Tested and Recommended software versions are listed on the Hardware Support page.
Licenses
VMware is a commercial manufacturer, and the use of both Fusion and Workstation Pro hypervisors requires a VMware license, which is offered by the Department of Future Technology of the University of Turku to students taking the department's courses. The license entitles you to use VMware Workstation Pro (Linux and Windows) or Fusion (MacOS) for one calendar year. You will receive the license code from the course lecturer.
Oracle VirtualBox
VirtualBox is an open source (GPL) hypervisor developed by Oracle. It is available for all operating systems and is offered directly in the package selection in many Linux distributions.
The virtual machines of the University of Turku only support graphics drivers provided by VirtualBox 6 and newer versions (VirtualBox changed its own vboxvideo driver to VMware graphics drivers at that time). Earlier versions of graphics drivers are not supported and are not recommended for installation.
We generally recommend that you always use the latest version of VirtualBox. Unfortunately, VirtualBox has potential stability issues, especially with MacOS, so the platform cannot be recommended without reservations like VMware. Tested and Recommended software versions are listed on the Hardware Support page.
Extensions
The basic use of VirtualBox works with free and free drivers, but more advanced device use (eg webcam) requires a separately installed non-free plug-in, which includes e.g. USB2 support.
Other hypervisors
Due to lack of resources, other hypervisors are not officially supported by the University of Turku's virtualization team, although some of them may work without problems. New versions are constantly appearing on different platforms, and the functionality of all their versions on all different operating systems cannot be comprehensively tested and guaranteed. You use these other hypervisor platforms at your own risk.
Where an OVA file on a virtual machine can be opened directly from, for example, the VMware and VirtualBox user interface (see the Deployment section ), for other virtualization platforms, the OVA file may first need to be decompressed with tar or 7zip and then set up to access VMDK files from the package. or converted to a platform-supported format (e.g., Hyper-V uses the VHD format instead of VMDK).
Attached are our experiences with various hypervisors.
Linux / KVM
KVM is perhaps the best supported and most powerful virtualization solution on Linux. Unfortunately, its support is limited to Linux, so for the sake of clarity, we don't recommend the platform as a general solution, even though its compatibility is good.
The virtual machines of the University of Turku operate via both Gnome Boxes and virt-manager user interfaces and directly from the command line with the qemu-system command. The USB version also works virtualized and qeme is used to test it. If you want to use a virtual machine with the above programs, refer to the documentation of these programs.
Using Gnome Boxes, on the other hand, is similar to VMware and VirtualBox platforms, so it is described in its own chapter.
Windows / Hyper-V
Hyper-V is a Microsoft virtualization platform. Preliminary support has been built on the platform for the virtual machine, but the implementation of the virtual machine is currently not possible due to the OVA format used, which is not supported by Hyper-V.
Disk images obtained from the OVA format can be converted to a format supported by Hyper-V, and Hyper-V driver support has been added to the platform, but deployment was not successful in testing. The platform may later be supported.
MacOS / Parallels
The Parallels platform is not supported and no support is planned.
The root cause of the problem is that Parallels does not recognize the hybrid disk format used by the virtual machine and it is now not possible to provide other formats. The platform may later be supported.
Linux / Xen
The Xen platform is not supported and no support is planned. Xen is not actually a virtualization solution for desktop use.