Working of a Virtual Machine

Primary Terminologies:

What is a Computer System?...

Intuition to Why we need Virtual Machines?

Note : If you are comfortable with why virtualization concept has been introduced, you can Skip to the Benefits of virtual machines section...

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...

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....

Popular Virtualization Software:

Azure Virtual Machines Oracle VirtualBox Google Compute Engine Red Hat Virtualization...

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....

F.A.Q’s

Q.1 Even without having VM’s, If we have a server which requires only lesser resources (let’s say 100GB hard disk, 32 GB RAM, 8 cores of CPU) and other servers which require higher amount of resources,((let’s say 300GB hard disk, 16 GB RAM, 6 cores of CPU) we can buy those servers only according to the requirement and then utilize the hardware efficiently without wasting the resources, then why only VM’s?...