Virtual Machine and Virtual Operating System

What is a Virtual Machine and a Virtual Operating System

A virtual machine is an artificially created virtual computer using special software. A virtual computer has its own RAM, hard drive, and processor. In simpler terms, it is a computer within a computer that uses part of the resources of the host computer (RAM, processor, and hard drive).

What is this special software? In this course, we will discuss two popular software solutions for creating virtual machines - VirtualBox and VMware.

A virtual operating system is an operating system installed on a virtual machine. You can install any system on a virtual machine that you can install on your computer and that is supported by the virtualization software you are using. The solutions we offer, VirtualBox and VMware, support all known desktop operating systems: Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD.

We often get the question: "Will creating a virtual machine affect the performance of my computer?" When creating a virtual machine, you specify how much RAM and hard disk space you are willing to allocate. Naturally, creating virtual machines requires sufficiently powerful computers with at least 4 GB of RAM.

What Do a Virtual Machine and a Virtual Operating System Look Like

For many beginners, this sounds scary, complicated, and unclear. Let me show you how it looks in practice. Here I have a laptop where macOS is installed as the main system - this is called the host system. I turn on the laptop and launch the VirtualBox program, where my virtual systems are located.

They appear in a list on the left, and by the end of the course, you will have a standard set there - Windows, Tails, Whonix, Mint.


I select, for example, Linux Mint, and it starts like a program in my host operating system. This is the virtual operating system, which is commonly referred to as the guest system.