Hello everyone,
I recently heard that a host PC is unaffected from viruses that have infected a virtual machine on that PC? How can this be the case, as both share the same hardware?
In: 9
The VM is like a fenced off portion of your computer that has no way out except for the ways you allow on purpose. The VM thinks it has, say, a 40GB hard disk but it’s actually just a 40GB file on your 4000GB hard disk. It thinks it has 2GB of RAM but that’s a 2GB section of your 32GB RAM. It thinks it has 1 slow processor core but it’s actually just the VM restricting itself to using a small percentage of your 4 core CPU.
These resources are walled off so there’s no way for the software inside the VM to access the rest of your computer. If a virus in the VM would try to do an operating system call, for example the windows CreateFile function to create a file, it gets to the operating system inside the VM, not the one outside.
If you don’t like what’s happening inside the VM, you can delete it and make another.
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