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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try it this way. a virtual machine is a program that runs on your machine and pretends to be another machine.
yes, a virtual machine can run another virtual machine inside it. i think statistically that means every machine is a virtual machine or something (sorry simulation hypothesis guys).
virtual machines are optimised to run fast enough that they’re almost as fast as your physical machine. so you can certainly browse the web and write documents. sometimes you can even play triple A games on them.
you can rent a virtual machine from Amazon, it runs on their servers and you can use it for pretty much whatever you want.
another kind of virtual machine is an emulator. these are programs that pretend to be other kinds of machines, like old 8 bit systems or games consoles.
common virtual machines are: vmware, virtualbox, hyper-v, amazon web services, microsoft azure, linode.
if you want to try out other operating systems, it’s often a good idea to make a virtual machine and install it on there. that way you don’t risk anything on your main machine.
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