Oracle developed VirtualBox to provide free and open-source hosted hypervisor for virtualization. In this article, we will be using Virtual Box for our virtualization. There are many virtualization tools that you can download, such as VMWare Fusion, Parallels Desktop, and VirtualBox. Virtualization is the process of running an operating system within another running system.
However, today we will focus solely on using virtualization to run Windows 11 on a Mac.
There are several ways you can run other operating systems on a Mac computer. By installing a virtual Windows 11 on your Mac, you can test your software’s compatibility with Windows as much as you want. However, a problem occurs when it is time to test their programs on a Windows 11 OS.
Plenty of software developers prefer working on a Mac rather than a Windows computer.
Installing Wine on the Mac can be a challenge for those not used to installing open-source Linux/UNIX apps. The problem is that trying to convert all of the Windows API calls is a huge undertaking, and there is no guarantee that an app you want to use has had all of its API calls successfully translated.Īlthough the task seems daunting, Wine does have quite a few success stories, and that's the key to using Wine: checking the Wine database to make sure the Windows app you need to use has been successfully tested. Instead of virtualizing the hardware and running Windows in a virtual environment, Wine forgoes the Windows OS completely instead, it converts the Windows API calls made by the Windows app into POSIX (portable operating system interface) calls, which are used on Linux and Mac operating systems.Īs a result, the Windows app can run using the host operating system's API instead of Windows. Wine takes a different approach to running Windows apps on a Mac. All three apps have lively forums and support services to help with tuning the performance. Guest OS may be more involved with some customization required to obtain the best performance. Installing the virtualization apps is similar to any other Mac app. Like the other virtualization apps, VirtualBox can be used to run many different operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. This free virtualization app runs on multiple computer systems, including Mac.
Virtualization abstracts the hardware layer, making it look like each operating system has its own processor, RAM, graphics, and storage. Virtualization allows several operating systems to run on computer hardware at the same time. Performance tuning and customization needed to achieve the best performance.