What is virtual machine?

Replies

• 

  shalini_goel14

  Hi safwan,
  
  Good question,
  I am not sure in what respect you are asking this virtual machine question. Have you checked Wikipedia?
  
  In short virtual machine is just like a real machine but hardware-wise it is not touchable. I guess example can be(Not sure anyone can correct me)- Remote Desktop Application
  When you type "mstsc" in Run command, Microsoft windows provide you the facility of connecting to another system(obviously on same network). In this way you can access the resources(every software and OS) of second sytem on your machine and can work on other system from your system. So that remote system will behave as a virtual machine on your system i.e actually not in your system but it exists in real.So it can also be called a virtual machine.
  
  May be this information can be helpful. Others Please do add other information or correct me if I have mentioned any wrong example.
• 

  safwan

  thanks shalini
• 

  just2rock

  virtual machine of today is wth a very simple example of a pendrive.Its a EEPROM that will sit on your active machine & can function similar to what your machine is performing.Within 2 years from now a simple pendrive can even run a OS into it?? How???
  ow will ROM come & where it will get DRAM...well engineers across globe are working for same.We are developing nanocarbon cells that will function similar to RAM/ROM with less thermal generation & will be embeede in the PLC of the virtual drive...wait for it to spoil your PC soon
• 

  Ashutosh_shukla

  What is a virtual machine?
  What i have heard is that without actually installing the OS we can have a virtual environment of that OS on another host OS This is possible through commercially available softwares such as VMWare Check a bit of Wikipedia and the Galvin book on OS it gives you fair idea
• 

  Kaustubh Katdare

  @Ashutosh: I guess the OS installation is an integral part of setting up Virtual Machine.
  
  Consider this situation: You have a physical machine (hardware+software). Install a virtualization software on the host OS. This virtualization software then creates a 'virtual machine'. When created, this is a 'blank machine' (as if the original machine is just booted).
  
  You will have to install an OS on it to make it work.
  
  PS: That's my idea of VM. Someone please correct if this is wrong information.
• 

  Sahithi Pallavi

  If shalini's point is correct,
  Can we say accessing the other systems on our PC by using the remote desktop services like logmein and teamviewer as the examples of Virtual Machine?
• 

  durga ch

  logmein and teamviewer are applications for remote login, wherein you are using the apps to loginot someone elses computer. Simple.
  Shalini had made a different point there. She meant something on these lines I suppose -
  You have a data centre, and you have huge processing speed and memory. You dont always use your data centre to maximum. WHat do you do?
  You make smaller potions of the resources available and then lease them out. Hence each 'resource' here has its own CPU processing speed , memory and incase of more requirements , more resources can be added. That is where we say virtual. We dont have areal computer, we dont have a real montior/CPU but we are still using virtual machin hosted on a server.
  VM concept has come into lime light now due to cloud computing. Cloud computing has made almost everythgin to be virtualised speaking of which either infrastructure as service (Iaas), Application as service (AaaS) or Platform as service(PasS). The example what has been quoted is Infrastructure as service, where the Datacentre infrastructure is been leased out.
  and sometimes it might be softwares which are scaling across many computer which act as a ;single; machine.