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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On the hypervisor level (the operating system, software, and/or hardware that the VM is actually running on), the VM is just a process, no different than any other.
The hypervisor, through whatever method, provides what looks like hardware to a process inside of it. An abstracted CPU, for example, basically just sees a fake CPU (vCPU) send instructions to a real CPU, which is connected to the hypervisor process.
The benefit is utilization. Your car can drive 175kph. Yet you never do. That horsepower is there because you need to be able to accelerate at a reasonable pace. When you aren’t using that extra horsepower though, it’s not really doing you any good.
Virtualization is the same. A computer will generally have spikes of usage and lulls in usage… but they’ve got their horsepower just to deal with those spikes. So by combining multiple virtual machines onto one set of hardware, that hardware just handles all of those spikes (since they don’t generally happen at the same time). Net result is the hardware sees a lot more utilization on average. Which saves money because you buy less hardware.
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