No matter how small demands a virtual machine might have, you will need a strong computer. It needs to have enough hardware resources to be able to run a hypervisor, build a virtual environment, and work in it, all while running the primary OS as well. For example, an app developer will create an environment perfect for building and testing various applications.Īlthough virtual machines and hypervisors don’t demand dedicated hardware, your computer needs to be able to run them. Because of this, Type 2 hypervisors are used to create specific environments with a single purpose. The primary OS manages the calls to resource allocation. Because of this, Type 1 hypervisors are considered to be more efficient than Type 2, and convenient for creating a virtual server, desktop, and apps.Ī hosted hypervisor or Type 2, is installed on a host machine that already has a primary OS. This is because the hypervisor treats the CPU, memory, and storage as a shared pool of resources from which it can take what is needed to run the virtual machine.Ī bare-metal hypervisor, or simply called Type 1, runs directly on your physical device and has immediate access to all resources. When you’re running a Virtual Machine and it demands more resources than the hypervisor allocated to it, the hypervisor will schedule the request to the physical device to reallocate more resources. But it is the physical hardware of your device that will execute all processes of a virtual machine. But the hypervisor also manages the VM by allocating physical resources such as CPU, memory, and storage to the virtual machine.

That means anything you do in the VM won’t influence your main OS and your device. Its purpose is to separate and isolate the Virtual Machine from your default operating system. The software that runs the Virtual Machine is called a hypervisor. Even though the VM is a virtual environment, it has its own storage where you can save different files, and it can connect to the internet.

The best way to understand what a virtual machine is is to imagine it as a file on your computer, that acts as a separate actual computer. A virtual machine exists in a virtual environment and it uses its own virtual devices, resources, and storage. A Virtual Machine, or VM for short, is like a separate computer system inside your system but it doesn’t exist in physical form.

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