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Listening, Growing and Adapting

veertu.com

72 pointsthemckman23 comments

I didn't even know of this app until now. How does it compare to VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, or Parallels, for example?

Likewise. The announcement makes it sound like they tried to compete with free (VirtualBox) and couldn't.

It uses the native hypervisor in macOS, so it can be smaller than VirtualBox.

And since it uses Hypervisor.framework, it does not require any extra kexts and the App Store version was running in a sandbox.

The difference between VB and Veertu is that the latter is much less invasive (so less potential for screwups and problems with other invasive solutions like VMWare Fusion) and it's potentially much faster because it leverages the Apple subsystem. VB has a chequered record on OSX.

I like Veertu, but I'm a bit sad about the increasing level of fragmentation in the virtualization space. Where before you had a couple of products, you now have dozens of mostly incompatible ones. I have team-mates pushing for Hyper-V since they're all on Windows, I don't like VirtualBox and I find it more and more difficult to justify spending money on VmWare licenses, considering they are not significantly improving desktop products. I wish new players like Veertu offered better interoperability, i.e. export features as well as import - although I understand why that might not look as being in their best interest.

I've used it for about six months now. It was/is missing a few bells and whistles (like a good quality scripting API to enable something like Vagrant, which I talked with their team about doing), but overall it's extremely robust and the lack of kexts needed makes it an immediate winner despite the few gotchas.

There's actually a Vagrant plugin to use Veertu as a backend. You can find the underlying CLI that the plugin uses in /Applications/Veertu Desktop.app/Contents/SharedSupport/cli if you want to script it yourself.

I know, hence why I said "was". I offered to write it but their engineers did instead after asking what functionality was important first.

First time I've heard of this app -- how well does it run Windows?

I'm curious about that as well. I would love to get rid of Parallels (even despite my having recently upgraded to the Sierra-compatible version) because I find things to be too slow in general.

Any pointers/reviews/etc.?

There is a video on comparison which Parallel is the fastest, VMWare, Veertu and Virtualbox is the slowest.

Qemu/kvm might be the fastest and works but is a hassle to configure for my web development.

What video are you referring to? I'm just finding a boot speed video when googling and I'm not sure if that really qualifies as a proper measurement of "fastest" when comparing products.

QEMU won't be fastest if your host is osx, because we don't support the osx virtualization API -- KVM requires a Linux host.

"We explored various methods to make these new features work with sandboxing restrictions of the App Store, but it seems that this is not possible."

I wonder if they tried using Docker's library/approach:

https://github.com/docker/vpnkit

It doesn't look like this open source version supports EFI boot, can it boot macos/osx? I know they have an internal version that does support EFI.

For clarity, the way I read it the native version is leaving the App Store and closed source. The old non-native version is now open source.

What old non-native version? I think you've mis-read this.

They appear to be moving to an open-core model and expanding feature sets beyond what was allowed within the restrictions of Apple's App Store sandboxing, to better compete with VMware Fusion and Parallels for paid users.

I'm confused, is there commercial version and what price? No "Buy" link is very confusing.

To support the transition for paid users, this is probably a free release as they work out payment methods, etc. They're moving to an open-core pricing model, which probably matches their previous strategy.

They've always been unclear when it comes to payment and features. Previous to this they had Business and Pro editions in the App Store and Pro was sold as an in-app purchase to a free version while Business was sold outright. Both cost the same and it was hard to compare the two...

If they want to sell the product later, you can bet they'll have clear Buy buttons.

their commercial version supports booting osx, https://github.com/veertuinc/vdhh/issues/1

Have they fixed their problems with VPNs?

It seemed silly this would have been compatible with the Mac OS sandbox in the first place

It uses hypervisor.framework [1] for building out virtual machines in userspace.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor

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