Apple @ Work: MacStadium announces free macOS virtualization with Orka Desktop

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MacStadium, a popular provider of Mac cloud services, including cloud computing, virtualization solutions, and remote desktops, has just launched Orka Desktop. This free tool for macOS virtualization simplifies the creation and management of macOS virtual machines with an easy to use GUI interface without adding additional cost to your workflows.

“Orka Desktop provides the tools to allow developers to create many different macOS image versions locally, commit those into a shared repository, and pass them around for collaboration. Developers can also scale further by pulling those resources into an Orka Cluster at MacStadium where you can orchestrate workloads with cloud resources.” said Chris Chapman, MacStadium’s chief technology officer. “Because Orka Desktop wraps and compresses your macOS image with an Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant specification and sparseness, it can mean a 90GB image is reduced as significantly as 80% shrinking it to nearly 15GB, which makes it much easier to move around. The OCI wrapper also allows teams to work with most standards-based registries.”

As more developers focus on building, testing, and deploying macOS and iOS apps, Orka Desktop is a great tool for virtualization at no cost. It offers dependable, standardized development environments. An Apple enterprise report reveals that 76% of large enterprises have increased their use of Apple devices in the past year. This virtualization ensures consistency across the development, testing, and production phases, significantly boosting operational efficiency.

“Developers regularly use virtualization tooling, but most aren’t aware of the fundamental differences and optimizations that tools can provide for Mac. We designed Orka Desktop to be the most performant and standards based macOS virtualization tool for Apple Silicon. Users can create or download custom macOS images locally for their own personal use, and collaborate with team members using familiar workflow, versioning, audit, and review controls. Ultimately, teams get the consistent environments that they need.” said Jason Davis, MacStadium’s chief product officer.

Orka Desktop enables developers to quickly and effortlessly set up macOS VMs. It’s perfect for those new to Mac virtualization and development team members looking to build and test locally. Key features include:

• Free local macOS virtualization gives developers robust tools to create, package, and distribute VMs at no cost.
• Near-native performance on Apple Silicon, with virtualization overhead as low as 5% in most cases.
• A seamless workflow for building and sharing images, simplifying content collaboration and distribution.
• An intuitive GUI interface that supports VM actions from local machines to the cloud, enhancing both efficiency and flexibility.

9to5Mac’s take

More options for macOS virtualization are a huge win for users of all sorts—consumer and enterprise. It’s fantastic to be able to quickly spin up virtual machines to test new settings, app workflows, and builds without any additional cost. While it doesn’t contain some of the enterprise management settings of other virtualization tools, it’s hard to beat the cost of free.

One thing to note: Orka Desktop doesn’t support Linux or Windows virtualization, so if that’s part of your needs, you’ll need to look elsewhere. Especially as organizations ramp up their testing of macOS Sequoia, Orka Desktop provides a free option for testing.

Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates in a single professional-grade platform all the solutions necessary to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage & protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.