Virtual Machine Utilization, Highlights and Advantages

Virtual Machine utilization highlights and advantages:

VMWare and Virtual Box are the most popular free distributions of virtualization software. The documentation below is for VirtualBox but google searches will provide extensive installation and configuration documentation to both applications/appliances.

Why are virtual machines useful?

Multiple Operating Systems on one computer:

Virtualization allows you to run more than one operating system at a time. This way, you can run software written for one operating system on another (for example, Windows software on Linux or a mac) without having to reboot to use it.

OS Management:

Virtual machines and their virtual hard disks can be considered "containers" that can be

arbitrarily frozen, woken up, copied, backed up, and transported between hosts.

Software Testing and Disaster Recovery:

Utilizing VirtualBox "snapshots", one can save a particular state of a virtual machine and revert  back to that state, if necessary.  

This way, one can freely experiment with a computing environment.  If something goes wrong (e.g. after installing misbehaving software or infecting  theguest with a virus), one can easily switch back to a previous snapshot and avoid the need of frequent backups and restores.

Any number of snapshots can be created, allowing you to travel back and forward in virtual machine time. You can delete snapshots while a VM is running to reclaim disk space.

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Resources:

Virtual Box installation manual:

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html

How to install Virtual Box in Windows 7 YouTube install videos:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=virtual+box+install+in+windows+7

Virtual box download page:

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads