eli5: What is a virtual machine?
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The simplest way to put it is to relate it to old retro game emulation if you are familiar. You emulate/virtualize a system within a physical system. There are tons of reasons and advantages as well as cons to utilizing such a thing that imo are a lot for an ELI5.
Examples would be-
to provide an environment that may not be possible to do physically. Much like the reason we emulate old gaming hardware since it’s increasingly more difficult and costly to obtain the original hardware.
Or to provide several isolated OS environments to clients using a single machine rather than dedicated hardware for each user.
Scale servers on the fly and isolate any malicious content.
And the list can really just go on.
VM tech is extremely prevalent right now. I urge anyone getting into this type of technology to get familiar with it. I was stubborn about it for ages, but this is where we are at.
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