QEMU is the most powerful and widely supported open source virtualization software.

Note: If you are using macOS with an Apple Silicon CPU (manufactured in 2020 and later), you will only be able to use QEMU and not VirtualBox. You will also need at least 10GB of free space to run the commands in this tutorial. If you are running on a DigitalOcean droplet, you should have at least 2 CPUs and 2GB of memory. You can install Homebrew on macOS, on Linux, or on Windows under WSL2. This tutorial provides installation instructions using the Homebrew package manager. The commands in this tutorial can be run on Windows, macOS, or Linux, as long as you can install QEMU and VirtualBox along with their command line tools. In this tutorial, you will learn how to convert between virtual machine image formats (including qcow2, vdi, vhd, and vmdk), so that you can take your virtual environments from your desktop to the cloud and back again as needed. These are referred to as virtual machine images, and are formatted differently across providers.

Apart from any large-scale cloud optimizations, the only significant difference between virtualization environments is that the virtual machine hard disks and configuration options. In either case, they are technically similar, and make similar assumptions. Virtual machines may include an entire desktop interface, or they may only run an SSH server to allow terminal connections. You can also work with virtual machines locally on your desktop, using software like QEMU or VirtualBox. When you are working with a remote cloud server, you are usually working with a virtual machine: a sandboxed, isolated instance of an entire operating system that is running within a larger server cluster.

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