Changes between Version 9 and Version 10 of Virtualization

Timestamp:

Nov 23, 2006 8:25:52 AM (17 years ago)

Author:

jose

Comment:

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Virtualization

@@ -1 +1 @@
 = Virtual machines = 
 
-When we describe !VirtualBox as a "virtualization" product, we refer to the particular kind of virtualization that allows an unmodified operating system with all of its installed software to run in a "virtual machine", which is an environment created by the virtualization software in which only certain hardware components are virtualized. The physical computer is then usually called the "host", while the virtual machine is often called a "guest". Most of the guest code runs unmodified, directly on the host computer.
+When we describe !VirtualBox as a "virtualization" product, we refer to the particular kind of virtualization that allows an unmodified operating system with all of its installed software to run in a "virtual machine" on top of your existing operating system. This is an environment created by the virtualization software in which only certain hardware components are virtualized. The physical computer is then usually called the "host", while the virtual machine is often called a "guest". Most of the guest code runs unmodified, directly on the host computer, and the guest operating system "thinks" it's running on real machine.
 
 !VirtualBox is therefore different from mere emulators such as [http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/ QEMU], which do not allow any guest code to run directly but translate every single machine instruction instead. While emulators theoretically allow running code written for one type of hardware on completely different hardware (say, running 64-bit code on 32-bit hardware), they are typically quite slow. Virtualizers such as !VirtualBox, on the other hand, can achieve near-native performance for the guest code, but can only run guest code that was written for the same target hardware (such as 32-bit Linux on a 32-bit Windows host).