Steps for Creating and Running Virtual Machines
– We will try to Install a Linux based PepperMint OS, Windows 10 OS using VirtualBox on a Windows 11 OS machine and run those virtual machines.
- Here, we will install the VirtualBox software.
For detailed installation steps on how to Installation of VirtualBox, Refer here. - Downloading the Required OS.
Download PepperMint OS – ISO file from the official site and Windows 10 setup file from the official site.
Installing PepperMint OS.
Installing Windows 10 OS. - After Installing ISO files, Open VirtualBox Manager.
- Toggle on Machine navbar and click on New for creating a new virtual machine.
- Set the Name of the machine, select the location of ISO file.
- Choose how much storage and the no. of CPU cores you want to allocate to your Virtual Machine.
- Click on Next and finish the Installation. Then, we will have a New virtual Machine inside virtual box as shown in the below image.
- Similarly, create a new Virtual Machine using VirtualBox for Windows 10 OS and you will see similar to the below image.
- Select the Virtual Machines and click on Start to run the Virtual Machines.
- Finally, we ended up creating two Virtual Machines( Windows 10, Linux PepperMint ) which can run simultaneously and share the resources on a single physical machine( Windows 11) as shown in the below GIF.
- Here, We are running both Virtual Machines with different OSes and they are sharing the same underlying physical hardware. In this case, Windows 10 and Linux PepperMint are Guest OSes and Windows 11 is the Host Operating System. And Oracle Virtual Box is a type-2 hypervisor based virtualization software and it relies on Host OS for managing the resources and co-ordination between Virtual Machines.
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.