Virtualization is an environment that supports the hardware to create virtual machines on an operating system or on bare metal hardware. For the beginners, it is wise to use virtual machine for practice or even for creating test environment. This is widely practiced even in industrial environment to create test servers on virtual software. Bare metal virtualization usually used on production level for creating different kind of environment, so we will not talk about it in here.
Let’s talk about the virtual software that we can use. This software usually installed on an operating system. The available software online are
- Vmware workstation
- Virtualbox,
- Mikrosoft virtual pc,
- Oracle vm virtualbox
- Parallels desktop
Etc.
All those virtualization software works as charm for creating virtual environment. Except few the rest of the virtualization environments are created by oracle usually. As those are oracle’s projects. So they have some basic similarities. Yet there are few choices that we need to make for the sake of our own comfort.
I am usually fan of VirtualBox, at the same time I am familiar with VMware workstation too. I also used parallel desktop. So I would explain how to install all three virtualization software.
Now let’s discuss why we should use virtualization instead of a real machine.
- A real machine can contain single machine at a time. But virtualization can provide more than one machine at a time.
- You can take backup of a virtual machine and restore when necessary. It is quite hard in case of a real machine.
- If you install operating system lots of time on virtual environment it will not harm any hardware, but in real machine it may harm a little.
- You can create as many machines as the hardware can support. Also you can use different operating systems on different virtual machines.
- In virtual machines you can get other facilities like storage virtualization, network virtualization and etc.
This same environment is usually created in lots of vendor exams for hands on work. So you can also create a full exam environment on your own computer for your own practice.
Eventually I will try to show kernel virtualization as that is the most common and mostly used virtualization on Linux.
On the next post you will get the installation process for the mentioned software above. I hope beginners will get help from this post. Please let me know if you have any question regarding this post.
