virtualization

If you want to get the most out of a weekend of tinkering, your hypervisor is a laboratory—and not every operating system needs a full‑blown, multi‑gigabyte VM to be useful. This feature walks through seven operating systems that are designed or well‑suited to run inside VirtualBox, VMware...

Set Up Windows Sandbox on Windows 10/11 to Test Apps Safely (No VM Setup) Difficulty: Intermediate | Time Required: 15 minutes Windows Sandbox is one of the safest and fastest ways to test unknown apps, installers, or scripts on your PC—without installing a full virtual machine or risking your...

Windows Server 2025 arriving on Amazon EC2 changes the calculus for many enterprises that still run heavy Windows workloads: the OS brings cloud-first security and performance features, and AWS provides ready-to-launch AMIs and integration points so organizations can move faster without...

Kali Linux’s 2025.4 release advances the distribution’s long march toward a modern, Wayland-first desktop while adding a small but consequential slate of new offensive-security tools and NetHunter updates that will matter to testers, red teams, and virtualization-focused labs alike. Background /...

Microsoft is closing 2025 with a sizeable Windows 11 update: a preview build released December 1 has already started surfacing a slate of UI polish, Copilot integrations, virtualization controls, gaming improvements and hardware-gated AI features — and Microsoft plans to roll the final Patch...

A flaw in libvirt causes external inactive snapshots created for shut-down virtual machines to be written with world-readable permissions, allowing any local, unprivileged user on the host to read guest disk contents and resulting in a medium-severity information disclosure vulnerability tracked...

A small, surgical kernel fix landed in November that closes a subtle but real crash risk in the Linux mount subsystem: CVE‑2025‑40195 addresses a NULL‑pointer handling error where mnt_ns_release can be invoked with a NULL argument from the listmount cleanup path. The change is small — a...

A small-but-critical Linux kernel change has quietly landed that protects systems running AMD Zen4 client processors from a surprising stability hazard: several Zen4 client SoCs were advertising support for virtualized VMLOAD/VMSAVE instructions, and when those instructions were actually used...

A stack-based buffer overflow in QEMU's e1000 emulated NIC — tracked as CVE-2025-12464 — creates a reliable host-side denial-of-service vector when a guest processes short frames in loopback mode, and operators running qemu/qemu-kvm in multi-tenant or untrusted-guest environments should treat...

A reachable assertion in QEMU’s USB handling (usb_ep_get in hw/net/core.c) can be triggered from an unprivileged guest and crash the host-side QEMU process, producing a host-level denial-of-service that administrators must treat as a high-availability risk and remediate immediately. Background /...

The virtual machine landscape in 2025 is more capable and more competitive than ever: major vendors have shifted licensing models, GPU virtualization has moved from niche to mainstream in server environments, and open‑source stacks such as KVM/Proxmox, QEMU, and Xen have narrowed the feature gap...

The Linux kernel received a targeted fix for a subtle but potentially dangerous race in the AF_VSOCK transport: during a blocking connect, if a signal or timeout arrived after the socket had already reached an established state, the code could disconnect or reset that already-established socket...

Chinese state-sponsored actors have been observed deploying a sophisticated backdoor called BRICKSTORM to maintain long-term, stealthy access across public‑sector and information technology environments — with confirmed targeting of VMware vSphere management infrastructure, Windows systems, and...

A coordinated government and industry response has confirmed that a sophisticated Go‑based backdoor called BRICKSTORM has been used in targeted espionage campaigns to establish long-term persistence on appliances and virtualization management systems, with operators exploiting appliance blind...

Organisations facing the end of Windows 10 support now have a clear, pragmatic option to protect operations and buy time for a controlled Windows 11 migration: virtualisation — used strategically — can deliver centrally managed Windows 11 desktops to legacy endpoints while IT teams sequence...

Organisations facing the end of Windows 10 support now have a clear, pragmatic option to protect operations and buy time for thoughtful hardware refreshes: virtualisation — used strategically — can deliver centrally managed Windows 11 experiences to legacy devices while teams plan and execute...

WinBoat is an ambitious, open‑source project that lets Linux users run real Windows applications by launching a KVM/QEMU Windows guest inside a container and compositing individual program windows into the native Linux desktop — a pragmatic middle ground between Wine/Proton compatibility layers...

Proxmox VE doesn’t feel like “another Linux distro” — it feels like a purpose-built control plane for self-hosting, homelabs, and small datacenters that removes a surprising amount of the friction that trips up hobbyists and sysadmins when they try to run many services on one machine. If you...

I finally bought a MacBook, but I’m still keeping Windows as my main platform—and that experience says far more about how we use computers today than it does about brand loyalty. What started as a curiosity trip into Apple’s tightly integrated hardware-software world quickly became a study in...

Imagine upgrading Windows 11 Home to Pro and finding the same elegant interface—but with a suite of hidden tools that fundamentally change what your PC can do for work, security, and virtualization. Background: why this matters right now Windows 11 ships in multiple editions, but the difference...