

This is because one of the advantages of a virtual machine is that any viruses, bugs, or problems are isolated to the virtual machine itself instead of your Mac due to the way they “sandbox” the operating system on your Mac. Virtual machines are also popular with programmers and developers that need to test software in a certain operating system. Games that require DirectX 12 or use anti-cheat software do not work in virtual machines.

Virtual machines can also be used to play Windows only games on a Mac although this doesn’t work for all games. The most common reason to use a virtual machine on a Mac is in order to use Windows only applications or games.Įxamples include Microsoft Visio, Publisher and Access all of which aren’t available for Mac. In our extensive research, we found that Parallels is the best virtual machine for Mac making it easy to install Windows 11 on a Mac including M1/M2 Macs and switch between macOS and Windows seamlessly. However, there are various Virtual Machines on the market and they all perform differently so we’ve taken a look at which VMs work best on a Mac in 2023. You can simply switch to Windows in macOS for example like you would with any other application on your Mac and start using it. Most commonly they are used to run Windows on a Mac but they can also be used to run Linux and older versions of macOS too.Īlthough there are various ways to run Windows on a Mac, Virtual Machines are the most convenient because you don’t have to shut down your Mac to use them.

I can tell you it works really well, it's easy to setup and very stable.Virtual Machines, also known as virtualization machines, virtual environments, hypervisors or simply VMs, allow you to run another operating system in macOS. I'm using it since I realise I didn't have to pay for having a good virtualization software on Mac OS X. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria. VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use.
