DEVOPSdigest

MacStadium announced the General Availability of Orka Desktop 3.0, a powerful, user-friendly tool that allows developers, testers, and macOS admins to create, test, and manage macOS virtual machines (VMs) on local Apple silicon-based computers.

The new version of Orka Desktop is available today for free, easy to access, and includes support for macOS 15 Sequoia as both a Guest and Host OS.

Orka Desktop is an enterprise-grade, free-forever solution, eliminating the financial barriers many developers face when working with virtualization tools. This launch comes at a crucial time, as Apple’s newest macOS 15 Sequoia became generally available (GA) today. Competing virtualization products often come with high up-front costs, and don’t yet support the most recent macOS, but Orka Desktop is available without a subscription or trial period. It offers a cost-effective alternative to other paid solutions in the market, making it accessible to small development teams and enterprise organizations alike.

“We wanted to give developers, testers, and macOS admins a way to have a local environment that they can customize with all their tooling, get it configured exactly the way they want, and then pass that version to their team—whether that’s 20 people or 500 cloud-hosted machines,” said Chris Chapman, senior vice president & chief technology officer at MacStadium.

This launch coincides with a pivotal moment for developers as macOS 15 Sequoia enters GA. Orka Desktop enables technologists to run and test Sequoia in a virtualized environment on their current machines, immediately. By offering instant support of macOS Sequoia, Orka Desktop 3.0 allows developers to begin testing and deploying their applications on the new OS as soon as it launches, accelerating their time-to-market and enhancing productivity.

“It’s really easy to get started with Orka Desktop,” said Jason Davis, chief product officer at MacStadium. “Thousands of technologists used Orka Desktop 3.0 during its beta period, and we were able to incorporate requests such as fine-tunable display settings into the GA release. We also built some commonly used VM images for download from MacStadium’s public repo including major and minor releases of macOS and a sample developer desktop with common tools. Orka Desktop wraps everything up, compresses it, and gets you running in minutes.”

Orka Desktop features a streamlined, graphical interface for setting up virtual environments, making it easier than ever to customize and manage virtualized macOS images. It supports Open Container Initiative (OCI) images, ensuring broad compatibility and flexibility across Orka runtimes. This makes Orka Desktop an innovative solution for macOS virtualization, benefiting both new users and existing Orka Cluster customers who can use it as an add-on to enhance their macOS environments.

Key Features of Orka Desktop 3.0:

■ macOS 15 Sequoia Support: day one support of the newest macOS.

■ Free Forever: No trial or subscription required.

■ Easy-to-use GUI: Customize CPU, memory, storage and display settings with a simple interface.

■ OCI-based Image Format: Transfer, share and use images effortlessly across Orka Desktop and Orka Cluster.

Orka Desktop is a valuable tool for iOS developers, IT administrators and any app development team interested in leveraging macOS virtualization to improve their DevOps and App Delivery processes. Its support for OCI-compliant images also ensures easy sharing and collaboration across teams.

Starting today, Orka Desktop 3.0 is generally available for download via MacStadium.com and GitHub.