Working of a Virtual Machine
- Virtual Machines are created by the user, by specifying the initial requirements like RAM, storage etc..
- Hypervisor will allocate these resources to the virtual machines.
- When a Machine is started, it runs as if is a separate computer system with each having it’s own CPU, RAM, storage, networking components etc. These Virtual Machines do not interact and they are isolated from each other.
- Each processes or tasks running on different virtual machines interacts with the hypervisor and hypervisor interacts with the hardware allowing programs run simultaneously utilizing the hardware efficiently.
- If there is a demand for more resources for a particular machine, hypervisor will dynamically allocate it.
- We can save the state of a particular VM and then we can also transfer it to other systems (we are cloning the system very easily).
- Stopping a particular VM will stop running a virtual machine and the progress, applications installed, tasks done are preserved if we close a Virtual Machine after saving it’s state.
How to Run Multiple Virtual Machines Windows and Linux Inside VirtualBox?
Virtual Machines are the software applications/files which emulate the physical computers.
This process of emulating a physical computer and making able to run instances of it on a single physical machine is called Virtualization.
A Virtual Machine (VM) allows us to run multiple or different Operating systems on a single physical machine and share the same hardware, networking, storage among them. Virtualization helps us to utilize the underlying hardware more efficiently.
A normal single computer system or a machine runs only one OS at a time, where as VM’s allow us to run multiple OS at a time.
We call it virtual because, there are no actual machines present, it creates an illusion as if we are actually using different machines each having it’s own hardware, input/output devices, CPU, storage, networking components etc.
In this article, we will primarily see :
- what are virtual machines?
- Working of a virtual machine.
- Benefits of using them.
- Popular Virtualization Software
- Installation of VirtualBox
- Creating Windows 10 and Linux Virtual Machines
- Running Windows 10 and Linux VM’s on a Windows 11 platform.
Before going into the detail of Virtual Machines, lets see some primary terminologies.