What is Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine (VM) is a software computer, like a physical machine, which provides an environment to run operating system and applications. It is comprised of a set of specification and configuration files and is backed by the physical resources provided by the host. It shares the hardware resources with other users, but isolates the operating system to change the end-user experience.

In computing, virtual machine is an emulation of a particular machine or system that facilitates an application environment installed on software to imitate the functionality of a dedicated hardware. The end-user has the same experience on the virtual machine as they would acquire on dedicated server.  It operates on computer architecture and functions of a real hypothetical computer and the system implementation involves specialized hardware, software or combination of both.

Virtual machine is classified into two major parts:

System virtual machine- It can be defined as a system platform that supports sharing of physical resources from the host side between multiple virtual machines, each running its own copy of operating system. The virtualization is provided by a technique known as hypervisor, which either run on bare hardware or on the top of the operating system.

What is Virtual Machine – Process VM is especially designed to provide a platform-independent programming environment that hides the information of the underlying hardware or operating system and enable program to run in the same way as given platform.