Nowadays, lots of the big companies let users to use their virtual machines with a price. There are gaming services that we don’t need to have a powerful GPU to play a modern games, compute services that we don’t need huge amount of RAM or CPU to compute very powerful algorithms which has super big matrix operations, Web servers which hosts our web pages, storage virtualization services that stores people documents or photos or network servers provide VPN to the users or many more services that product of VMs.
Virtual Machine is an operating system runs in another operating system without aware of this. It has a CPU, ram, disk storage and network if it is needed. Virtual Machines (VMs) not only can be installed on servers but also can be install-able on a desktop, laptop.
Hypervisor
Hypervisors have vital role in virtualization technology. Hypervisor create a layer between hardware from software. It is a software that allows VMs to use the hardwares such as CPU, RAM or other physical resources.
Ok, OK. I got it. It is a brilliant software. How can i install it ?
There is two type of hypervisors. Hypervisor 1 and 2.
Hypervisor 1 is installed on a usb drive or hard drive. Hypervisor installation is the bare metal. Then, we build your virtual machines over that. VMware ESXi, Oracle VM, Hyper-V, Proxmox are well known hypervisor 1 types.
Hypervisor 2 is that we have a operating system which is already installed on a hard drive (bare-metal), than we install a hypervisor and create virtual machines. Virtualbox, VMware Workstation or Fusion, Qemu, Microsoft Virtual PC etc.
What are the Differences ?
Hypervisor 1
– Hypervisor is the Bare-Metal
– Hardware Virtualization
– More Secure
– Faster
– Average Complexity
Hypervisor 2
– OS is bare-metal. Hypervisor is hosted.
– Software Virtualization
– Less Secure
– Slower. [System Dependencies]
– Simple Complexity Configuration
If you have a bare-metal Windows machine and want to create an Ubuntu VM, it is a simple. Just download a Hypervisor-2 such as virtualbox and install the OS. It will be slow performance but it will survive. Even you did this process on your linux machine, it will not be super fast. Because the lack of GPU, the system performance will be low. If you don’t have a NVIDIA’s Richie Rich Edition GPU, you can not virtualize your GPU with hypervisor-2 softwares except QEmu.
Conclusion
The VM technology is widely used in the market today. Lots of companies use it everyday. The people who need for testing viruses, testing their designs or codes on different platforms or any other purpose, they use virtual machines. Personally, one of my VM is CentOS VM which is a KMS Server. Lots of individual people who don’t use Windows os in their normal life, but need it for gaming, uses the VM technology. Also I’d like to mention that, Hackintosh works very good with GPU Passthrough and installation is more more basic than bare-metal hackintosh installation.
If you use Virtual Machines, what do you use it for ?
