virtual machine (VM)
Virtual Machine Virtualization: The term virtualization has many meanings, and aspects of virtualization permeate all aspects of computing. Virtual machines are one instance of this trend. Generally, with a virtual machine, guest operating systems and applications run in an environment that appears to them to be native hardware and that behaves toward them as native hardware would but that also protects, manages, and limits them. Overview: The fundamental idea behind a virtual machine is to abstract the hardware of a single computer (the CPU, memory, disk drives, network interface cards, and so forth) into several different execution environments, thereby creating the illusion that each separate environment is running on its own private computer. In the case of virtualization, there is a layer that creates a virtual system on which operating systems or applications can run. Virtual machine implementations involve several components. At the base is the host, the underlying hardware syst...
