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Parallels Desktop is a paid virtualization solution developed specially for Apple Macintosh computers, which enables Mac users to run Windows, Chrome OS, or various Linux distributions along with the native operating system or utilize a second instance of macOS. Oracle VM VirtualBox is an open-source cross-platform virtualization software which supports a wide range of guest operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and BSD, and provides the ability to create multiple virtual machines and run them simultaneously.
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Supporting various releases of Linux, FreeBSD and Windows, Hyper-V provides a variety of tools for easy server management and powers Microsoft’s Azure Cloud. Microsoft Hyper-V, formerly Windows Server Virtualization, is an advanced virtualization software option which is supplied with Windows Server 2008, Windows 8 and above and used mainly in the server environment, often for creation of private clouds. Most products have free and paid professional versions. VMware offers an impressively extensive selection of virtualization solutions each tailored to specific needs, like VMware Workstation for Microsoft Windows and Linux, VMware Fusion for macOS as well as an enterprise-class hypervisor VMware ESXi which runs directly on the server hardware without any underlying operating system. The leading hypervisor products on the modern market include: As a rule, hypervisors are implemented on the software level, but there are also ones embedded into the system firmware. The hypervisor is known as virtual machine manager: it allocates physical resources to each of the systems and ensures that they do not interrupt each other. Each guest OS starts up and runs in an individual window on a host OS, similar to an ordinary program.Īll the virtual hardware which powers the guest OS is handled by a special engine called a hypervisor. The operating system the virtual machine is installed on is called the host OS, while the operating system of the virtual machine itself is referred to as the guest OS. Despite being located within a real physical host and making use of its resources, a virtual machine remains completely independent: it uses its own software-based components (the CPU, motherboard, video adapter, network interface, memory and hard disks), which may even differ from those of the host, and runs its own OS and applications. Possible difficulties and ways to overcome themĪ virtual machine is a special piece of software wich emulates the operation of a physical machine.Data storage peculiarities: virtual disks.
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