However, you can use a hypervisor (a lightweight software layer) to manage the physical hardware. A virtual machine can’t interact directly with a physical computer. You can create multiple virtual machines, each with an operating system and applications on a single physical device. Virtual machineĪ virtual machine (VM) is a virtual representation of a physical computer. In essence, the main advantage of virtualization is that it’s a more efficient use of physical computer hardware. It allows a user or a business to run multiple virtual computers and operating systems on a single physical server. Virtualization creates an abstraction layer over the physical hardware to create a virtual computing system, known as virtual machines (VMs).

The article will highlight several open-source virtualization software like Oracle VM VirtualBox, Linux-KVM, Redhat virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen Project, oVirt, and boxes in Fedora. The Linux community has created several virtualization tools or Virt tools like QEMU, KVM, Libvert, or libguestfs which act as the basis for creating open-source virtualization software. Virtualization is most preferred and applied for cloud computing. Virtualization software has become popular as they extend the capabilities of a system drastically. These instances are called virtual machines. You can create many instances of a given operating system on a single computer. Virtualization in computing involves creating virtual machines, storage, hardware, computer network resources, or an operating system.

The best virtual machine software