I’m trying to understand them a bit better, but it’s just not clicking for me. How is it able to operate like a physical computer and what is the benefit of that? Would you be able to say write an essay for your English class on a VM, save it there, and access it at a later time?
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A virtual machine is basically an OS (operating system) that interfaces with you and the host OS, instead of interfacing with you and the physical hardware.
Before deciding which Linux distro to put on an old, slow laptop I have kicking around, I used a VM to try a bunch of them out from Windows. The Linux distro is talking to the VM, which is just a Windows program, thinking that its talking to the hardware itself. Doesn’t run as quickly as the distro alone on a PC would (Its’s ‘Linux -> VM -> Windows -> Hardware’ instead of ‘Linux -> Hardware’), but but it let me have a taste.
The thing is, as a VM is just a program, you can have many of them running, each with a different OS, each given its own chunk of physical resources at its disposal (ram, diskspace, CPU cores etc.) so it is more useful a technology for servers. A server can have dozens of cores and hundreds of gigs of RAM running many VMs to serve clients whatever they need.
Out of that scope, the use cases get harder to justify. They can be useful in researching computer viruses to a degree, and the virus tries to do things to the OS, but with a VM the virus can think its messing with the OS, but is really just messing with the VM, and can be contained through it.
Writing an essay? Yea totally, but it will only be seen by that VM… if you use a VM to load a OS to run a program to write an essay… that VM has a chunk of disk space set aside for it, and only the VM can really access that diskspace.
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