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?
In: 49
The whole point of virtual machines is to utilize hardware better. Let’s say you have an office and you want a file server. You buy a server with a CPU, RAM and storage, you install Windows Server on it and configure it for file storage.
So far so good. The server is barely doing anything, it just sits there idling 99% of the time but that’s ok.
Now Steve in Accounting and Mary at the frontdesk both want to have their own printers on their desks. Other employees want to use those too.
So you buy a second server, plug it in, boot it up. install Windows Server and configure it as a print server. Sweet.
Remember Steve in accounting? He would like some cool intranet page to display his spiffy graphs on, for everyone to see.
So off to BestBuy you go to buy a third server. You find an extra powerstrip, you plug it in, install it, configure it as webserver and everyone is happy.
Congrats. You now have three servers all doing pretty much nothing 24/7. But what if….what if you used one physical server, and then built three virtual servers on it. Those virtual servers all have their own operating system, their own IP adress and everything and appear to the outside world as an individual server. But in reality it’s all just running on one physical box. It’s a lot cheaper (less hardware), and the hardware is much better utilized.
This is a very simple little sketch to give you an idea. It doesn’t go into the cooler details like the fact virtual machines are for a big part hardware independent, so you can fail-over all virtual servers to a different physical box, in case the host suddenly has a hardware failure for instance.
VM’s: they are cool stuff and big parts of the world are running on them.
Latest Answers