Desktop hypervisors are like buses: none for ages, then four at once

September has been a big month for desktop hypervisors, with the field's big players all delivering significant updates.

Oracle delivered VirtualBox version 7.1, billed as a major upgrade thanks to its implementation of a UI with a "modernized look and feel, offering a selection between Basic and Experienced user level with reduced or full UI functionality."

Oracle had previously referred to "Expert" mode, but it is unclear if the change in language is truly significant.

The new release also allows cuts of Linux and BSD coded for the Arm architecture to run on macOS hosts.

Cloning VMs from the desktop into the Oracle cloud is another option, and the desktop hypervisor can then report on resource usage of cloudy VMs. Which will be handy, as sending a monster VM to the cloud where it burns budget will not be welcome.

Parallels also released a desktop hypervisor update last week. Version 20 of the eponymous tool now offers a VM that's packed with tools developers may find handy as they work on generative AI applications. Among those tools are the Docker community edition, lmutils, the OpenCV computer vision library, and the Ollama chatbot interface for AI models.

"You can try to use pretty much any model that fits into your Mac resources," Parallels has advised, adding that sample apps available in the VM have been tested with Google's Gemma2:2b model, Microsoft's Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct-gguf, Reach-vb's Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-Q6_K-GGU, and TheBloke's Llama-2-7b-Chat-GGUF and OpenHermes-2.5-Mistral-7B-GGUF. The product can handle guests running macOS Sequoia and Windows 11 24H2.

Desktop hypervisors are often used by developers, and Parallels seems to have acknowledged that with a new management portal that brings single sign-on to the product. Volume licensing is another addition.

The other big player in desktop hypervisors is VMware, with its Fusion and Workstation products for macOS and Windows respectively.

Both were recently updated. Workstation reached version 17.6 and added vmcli - a command line tool that allows users to interact with the hypervisor directly from a Linux or macOS terminal, or the Windows command prompt.

"With vmcli, you can perform a variety of operations such as creating new virtual machines, generating VM templates, powering on VMs, and modifying various VM settings. Additionally, you can also create scripts to run multiple commands sequentially," according to the product's changelog.

Fusion reached version 13.6, and also gained vmcli. Release notes can be found here. ®