The hypervisor emulates the computer's CPU, memory, hard disk, network and other hardware resources, creating a pool of resources that can be allocated to the individual VMs according to their specific requirements.
Definition virtuelle maschine software#
Although users might run into occasional glitches, such as not being able to run an application in a virtual environment, these types of issues tend to be minimal.Ī computer that hosts VMs requires specialized software called a hypervisor. Resources such as CPUs (central processing units), memory and storage appear much like they do on a physical computer. The guest OS and its applications can be configured and updated as necessary and new applications installed or removed, without affecting the host or other VMs. In most cases, users connecting to a VM won't be able to tell that it's a virtual environment. The VM is still dependent on the host's physical resources, but those resources are virtualized and distributed across the VMs and can be reassigned as necessary, making it possible to run different environments simultaneously, as well as accommodate fluctuating workloads.įrom the user's perspective, the VM operates much like a bare-metal machine. In this way, a single computer can host multiple VMs, all running different OSes and applications, without affecting or interfering with each other. The VM's OS is commonly referred to as the guest OS, and it can be the same as or different from the host OS or the other VMs. What is a VM and how does it work?Ī VM provides an isolated environment for running its own OS and applications independently from the underlying host system or from other VMs on that host.
The end user has the same experience on a VM as they would on dedicated hardware. Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical CollegeĪ virtual machine (VM) is an operating system (OS) or application environment that is installed on software, which imitates dedicated hardware.