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Disclaimer: I work for a VMware consultancy provider. Any opinions or statement in this article are personal.
VSphere 6.0 -Difference between vSphere 5.0, 5.1, 5.5 and vSphere 6.0 210996 views / Posted Last updated Jul 4, 2017 at 1:14PM Published on Feb 3, 2015 101 Free Tools for VMware Administrators. Veertu includes key usability features like full-screen mode for a seamless Windows experience, copy/paste between OS X and Windows virtual machines and shared folder so you can access the same files from OS X as well as on Windows. Version 1.0.5: Import VMs from other virtualization solutions; Ability to change location of VM Library.
Recently i got in touch with Veertu, a startup focused on virtualisation aimed at the Mac OS X market, and they were kind enough to provide me with a license of their desktop virtualisation product to use and test. I've been using it the last few days to run my virtual machines on my laptop, and so far it's been a breeze.
When we look at the market for products to run virtual machines on your desktop, we have a few options: There's VMware Fusion and Parallels when we look at commercial products, and Virtualbox from the open source side, but they all universally suffer from one major flaw: feature bloat. For most of us, from the technical staff using virtualisation to test new products or build demo environments to the manager using virtualisation to run that last remaining windows-only piece of software on his Macbook, what we want is simply the possibility to run a virtual machine. From my personal experience, advanced features such as snapshotting, linked clones, virtual networks and the likes are hardly ever touched.
And this is where Veertu shines: they offer a no-frills desktop virtualisation product that does exactly what it needs to do, and does it lightning fast. When comparing Veertu to similar products, it just feels snappy, you don't get lost in menus and buttons everywhere, and it just works straight from the start. Personally, this is something i could explain to a non-technical person and not expect them to get hopelessly lost.
This is Veertu's user interface, and it most certainly passes the 'Can i explain this to my parents'-test.
![Native Native](https://img.magimg.com/uploads/carbon-copy-cloner.jpg?2)
When we look at resource usage, it is noticable that Veertu is very lightweight to its competitors. Memory usage is significantly lower, and disk usage as well. While this might not be that interesting in the time where memory and disk capacity are dirt cheap, it's always nice to see a company caring about optimization of its products.
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![Virtualization Virtualization](https://is4-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Purple7/v4/55/40/ee/5540eee8-d178-5e82-0c89-c2659b3c26b1/pr_source.png/643x0w.png)
Ofcourse there are some issues, as with any software product. One small gripe i had with the user interface is the fact that when you customize a virtual machine hardware, there's no 'save' or 'confirm button'. You edit the hardware, and it's done live. When you close the hardware window, the changes have already gone through. Though it's only a minor issue, it was slightly confusing at first. In addition, the guest OS tools gave a warning during the installation on Windows 2012R2 core, which turned out to be non-critical.
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Where's the confirm button?
When we look at features, there's not much to say. It does virtualisation, and it does it well. When it comes to hardware support, we have the basic e1000 and rtl8139 virtual nics, LSI logic SAS controller for storage. Guest OS drivers are available, and files in the host OS can be accessed seamlessly. One very nice feature in Veertu was the fact that it has an option to remap the Cmd key to Ctrl in the guest OS. In addition, Retina HDPI support comes out of the box, showing that this product is very clearly targeted at Mac OS X users and that they understand their user base.
But the best feature - and this is something i haven't seen in other products - is the possibility to download virtual machines directly from the internet. No more having to look around for that ISO or having to store them for that one moment you need them. Just create a new virtual machine, select the download option, and you're good to go. Currently Veertu offers a variety of open source operating systems. You've got your mainstream Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, Fedora and Debian, but also some more niche products such as Kali, CoreOS, Boot2Docker and ofcourse Free- and OpenBSD. The fact that you can just download and install an operating system without having to go through the usual steps means it's a great quality of life improvement, and hopefully they can expand the library of available operating systems in the future.
All in all, i'm very happy with Veertu and i think for my day to day usage i'll keep using it. For a bit more advanced labs where i have to be able to clone virtual machines on a regular basis, i'll still have to stick with Fusion, but truthfully, i can't recall the last time when i ran a full-fledged lab on my laptop.
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Veertu is available for free (limited to running virtual machines from the library) or $40 (allows you to install and run any operating system, including windows) from the App store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/veertu/id1024069033. More information can be found at http://veertu.com. In addition, Veertu is working on some other products designed to break open the Mac OS X virtualisation market, so make sure to keep an eye out if you're a Mac OS X or IOS developer or system engineer.