In-Depth
No-Cost macOS Desktop Virtualization Tool: Orka Desktop
The desktop hypervisor world is starting to get interesting again. A few months ago, VMware announced that you can download and use their x64 Desktop Hypervisor (Workstation) and the macOS Desktop Hypervisor for personal use for free. On July 10, MacStadium, the industry-leading Mac cloud services provider, announced that they launched Orka Desktop, a free, local macOS virtualization tool.
[Click on image for larger view.]
They state, "Orka Desktop is a desktop virtualization program that allows you to create and manage macOS virtual machines locally." And " Automate and optimize your Mac cloud resource usage with virtualized macOS on demand. Orka allows you to quickly deploy ephemeral VMs based on saved custom images for everything from simple Xcode builds to fully integrated, automated CI/CD pipeline."
[Click on image for larger view.]
Orka Desktop is not just about creating macOS image versions. It's about sharing them. This product enables developers to create a variety of macOS image versions on their local macOS machines and store them in a repository for other developers to use. It's a collaborative tool that fosters teamwork and efficiency.
[Click on image for larger view.]
It needs to be noted that the folks behind Orka Desktop are MacStadium, a Mac cloud services provider. Orka is a portmanteau for Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple and the Desktop is just a part of the Orka family of products.
[Click on image for larger view.]
I think MacStadium is releasing Orka for free because developers can also scale these images by pulling those resources into an Orka Cluster at MacStadium, where they can orchestrate workloads with cloud resources.
On the technology side, Orka Desktop wraps and compresses macOS images with an Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant specification, which means the images can be reduced by as much as 80 percent. They also claim that the images obtain near-native performance on Apple Silicon, with virtualization overhead as low as 5 percent in most cases.
Orka Desktop is now available here along with more information on the web site and Welcome to Orka Desktop 3.0 guidance.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.