Before long ago, people used to install multiple Operating system in their PC or laptop in order to used multiple OS. This method is space consuming and also very complicated, where you have to setting up the boot setting in order to arrange your operating systems installed in your laptop or PC. Finding out every single driver that runs depending on which OS is working in your laptop or PC is very troublesome. Therefore, thank God, IT people invented a tool that able to simplify this method whenever we need to have multiple OS running in our PC/laptop, which is called Virtual Machine.
Virtual Machine (VM) is software implementation of a machine that executes programs like a physical machine. This software will enable you to operate multiple operating systems in a single PC/laptop and it is completely isolated from your physical machine, therefore any programs and files stored in the virtual machine do not affect the host machine at all. Before starting ethical hacking, it is important to know and understand first the very basic of its environment, i.e virtual machine.
Among all virtual machine software, I found VMware workstation would be the most efficient and optimal VM. There are many types of virtual machine available to be used such as VMware, VirtualBox, VirtualPC, etc, however, the difference between each type of virtual machine will be discussed in the next post. In general, VMware virtual machines possess four key characteristics that benefit the user:
Compatibility: Virtual machines are compatible with all standard x86 computers
Just like a physical computer, a virtual machine hosts its own guest operating system and applications, and has all the components found in a physical computer (motherboard, VGA card, network card controller, etc). As a result, virtual machines are completely compatible with all standard x86 operating systems, applications and device drivers, so you can use a virtual machine to run all the same software that you would run on a physical x86 computer.
Isolation: Virtual machines are isolated from each other as if physically separated
While virtual machines can share the physical resources of a single computer, they remain completely isolated from each other as if they were separate physical machines. If, for example, there are four virtual machines on a single physical server and one of the virtual machines crashes, the other three virtual machines remain available. Isolation is an important reason why the availability and security of applications running in a virtual environment is far superior to applications running in a traditional, non-virtualized system.
Encapsulation: Virtual machines encapsulate a complete computing environment
A virtual machine is essentially a software container that bundles or “encapsulates” a complete set of virtual hardware resources, as well as an operating system and all its applications, inside a software package. Encapsulation makes virtual machines incredibly portable and easy to manage. For example, you can move and copy a virtual machine from one location to another just like any other software file, or save a virtual machine on any standard data storage medium, from a pocket-sized USB flash memory card to an enterprise storage area networks (SANs).
Hardware independence: Virtual machines run independently of underlying hardware
Virtual machines are completely independent from their underlying physical hardware. For example, you can configure a virtual machine with virtual components (eg, CPU, network card, SCSI controller) that are completely different from the physical components that are present on the underlying hardware. Virtual machines on the same physical server can even run different kinds of operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc).
Reference:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/virtual_machine
www.VMware.com/virtualization/virtual-machine.html
