Hypervisor of Choice

When managing a home lab or running virtual machines on your PC, you’re probably wondering which virtualization software to choose. Well, that competition is officially over. VMware Workstation Pro, the gold standard for virtualization, is now free for personal use. Whether you're setting up a test environment or tinkering with new operating systems, this is the tool to use.

But why? VirtualBox is also free, I hear you say. Well Workstation Pro has more features, performs better, and is more stable than Virtualbox, which has a tendency to be finnicky. If you have the Workstation Player, "upgrading" gets you amazing features like snapshots, an invaluable tool to save progress states on Virtual Machines. This is great for saving states of Virtual Machines before you or your tools make them have anything from slower boot times to kernel panics.

Seriously though, it's free. Check it out on VMWare's website.