what is a Virtual Machine(VM)?
A VM is a virtual environment that serves as an actual computer with its own CPU, memory, network interface, and storage, using the resources of an underlying host machine.
Its roots are based on hypervisor software. The hypervisor software creates an abstraction layer between physical hardware and virtual machines. Each VM is encapsulated from the host system and other guest systems in its own virtual environment. Characterized into two varieties.
- Bare-metal hypervisor — runs directly on the host machine’s physical hardware.
- Hosted hypervisor — runs as an application on the host operating system.
Several virtualization software available in the market, few popular like Oracle VirtualBox, VMware Fusion for Mac users, VMware workstation for Windows and Linux, V2 cloud, etc.,
Virtualization software provides emulation functions that allow guest machines with different system architectures to be operated in parallel on the same host machines. exemplified below.
Above mentioned is a type 2 hypervisor, host machine with windows OS. Oracle virtual box as software, a guest machine with Linux Ubuntu.
Few advantages are, allowing multiple operating systems to exist on the same machine. Can have a diversified working environment for development and testing.
If you have several virtual machines running, managing all of them is a bit challenging, in that case, Vagrant comes to the rescue. So, what is Vagrant? a command-line utility tool which helps in managing virtual machines.
😄 …..Happy Reading….. 😄
