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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Yes you can do that if you wanted to. Simply put, it’s a computer running in a computer.
There’s a few advantages:
Server infrastructure – Everything in AWS/Azure runs on VMs. It makes it easier to manage huge amounts of servers. If one goes down, you can restart a VM on another physical box without losing any data.
Security – This is becoming more important. Separate VMs typically cannot interfere with another VM or access their data. A lot of modern computers are taking this strategy to keep your device secure. This is also known as sandboxing
Where you use them and probably don’t realize it: The XBox consoles run games as VMs. The entire internet. Some computers (eg the Surface Book line of devices) run the OS as a VM and use a more secure OS running on top of it.
On your suggested use, some journalists actually use something similar to this to protect themselves and their sources. They might use a VM (or similar strategy) in order to hold and store really sensitive information and articles to prevent it from being hacked or tracked.
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