Benefits of Virtual Machines
- Resource Utilization: The hardware resources like CPU, Storage, Network components are utilized very efficiently when there are several machines using these resources.
- Lower Expenditure costs: Utilizing the hardware resources properly for several machines will makes us to buy only fewer machines which will lower the expenditure costs.
- Shorter Development and Testing times: We do not manually switch between different operating systems to test our applications.
- Flexibility: Using Virtual Machines, we can dynamically allocate resources to a machine, and hence for scaling out or in, we have a great flexibility to do , unlike in physical servers, we have to manually place a new server and upgrade it.
- Lower Maintenance Time: Upgrading or adding more no. of servers physically to the existing ones and enabling co-ordination between them will take much time and might result in server down time.
- Energy Efficiency: Lesser the Physical servers, lower the power consumption, lower carbon foot print and hence energy efficient.
- Space Savings: More the servers, we usually require more space to accommodate them in the data centres.
- Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is the technology where IT resources like servers, networking components, Run time environments, storage, computing power are provided on demand over Internet by the third party and usually follows a pay-as-you-go principle. It helps us to get rid of manually owing a physical server and upgradation of servers (which might take lots of time and may result in high costs, inefficient space and energy resources). Rather everything can be provided by the cloud provider on demand ( in a very less time, almost instantly with a few clicks). This would be only possible if they are using virtualization (as they can upgrade easily, more flexibility in allocation of resources to us than the traditional way of owing a physical servers and manually upgrading it). Hence, Virtualization is one of the backbone of Cloud Computing technology.
Check out here, for in-depth Cloud computing tutorial
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.