Monday, February 24, 2014

What is a Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine (VM) is a set of files which emulates of a physical computer. Popek and Goldberg defined Vritual Machine as "an efficient, isolated duplicate of a real machine".

A Vitrual Machine is created on top of a virtual layer or a virtual platform(Hypervisor) or a virtual layer (VMware work station) that runs on top of an operating system(Windows XP,etc)

The guest operating system  and programs running inside a Virtual Machine, are not aware of on which hardware platform they are running on. Therefore the Virtual Machine's virtual platform is supported by the guest operating system, and this OS can be installed in the same way it would be deployed to physical server hardware. For example, to the guest OS, it appears to have a physical hard disk attached to it, but actual I/O requests are translated by the virtualization layer so they actually occur against a file that is accessible by the host OS



Virtual machines isolated to ensures that applications and services that run inside a Virtual Machine cannot interfere with the Host OS or with anyother Virtual Machine(s). 

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