Why, When, and How To Use a Virtual Machine

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I must admit I haven't been a huge fan of virtual machines for personal use until recently. As a Linux advocate who would take pains to convert users to Linux, virtual machines served no purpose for me. Back in 2005, the greatest challenge for Linux was hardware: wireless wouldn't work; Bluetooth might not work, graphics would give glitches and even USB devices like tablet pens refused to talk.

 

Every time you came across a new device, you had to find drivers and wrappers to make things work. A Linux user needed to interact with “real” hardware to find solution; a virtual machine was out of question. As a Linux journalist, I could not rely on a virtual machine to review a distro and recommend it. I needed to know how well it worked with “real” metal.

 

Things have changed, however. Thanks to work done by kernel developers like Greg Kroah-Hartman, most hardware works out of the box on Linux. Hardware support has become less and less important and the focus has shifted to the unique features of distros. Of late, I have become a heavy user of virtual machines, which allows me to safely play with multiple distros on the same machine and write about them.

 

Virtual machines are used heavily in the enterprise segment, but in this article I am going to talk about advantages of virtual machines for new Linux users and how they can benefit from them.

 

 

Who Needs a Virtual Machine?

 

Many Linux users have to dual boot because they need certain proprietary software or services that are not yet available for Linux. In many countries, software needed for tax filing and other government related work is supported only on Windows. Instead of going through the complexity and pain of dual booting, you can easily use virtual machine to run Windows software.

Looking at the vulnerabilities found in Microsoft Windows, I would be extremely careful with it running on my main system. I am much more comfortable keeping Windows in a contained virtual environment. That way, even if it is compromised, it will not damage my entire system or data and will only affect the limited set of files it was accessing. I run a Windows 8.1 machine in virtual environment to perform certain tasks that couldn’t be done under Linux -- although I rarely use that machine.

 

One area where virtual machines won’t work are gaming. You need to talk to real CPU, GPU, and RAM to get the gaming experience you want -- especially if you are playing resource hungry games like Crysis. Audio and video editing won’t work either, as you don’t want a virtual layer between the application and the hardware. Beyond these and some other areas, virtual machines work great.

 

VMs also can be useful for those non-Linux users who want to play with Linux or who want to migrate to it but don't want to jump shark by formatting the OS they were used to and switching to Linux. Virtual machines get these users comfortable with Linux, so they can make the switch with confidence when they are ready. And, you can be running Linux “inside” your shiny Mac OS X or Windows 10.

 

The best thing about virtual machines is that I can run multiple Linux distributions on the same hardware, without having to reboot to switch between distros. As a Linux journalist, it’s extremely important for me to run various distros and keep an eye on them. And, as a Linux user, it’s even more important to be well versed with all major distros instead of being “vendor-locked” or totally dependent on any one. Using VMs, I can also run different desktop environments on the same system without having to log out to change the environment.

 

If you are aspiring to become a system admin or developer, you certainly don’t want to know only one distro; you must be an expert in any Linux; you never know which OS your employer or client would be using. You can’t say “sorry, I know only Ubuntu.” If you are a developer, you need different distributions to test your applications.

 

You can clearly see that there are many advantages of using virtual machines. The biggest advantages of using virtualization instead of multi-booting is efficiency. I used to waste way too much time in formatting hard drives and switching between distros. With virtual machines, you can start a new virtual machine for a distro without affecting your work; it’s as easy as opening a new application.

 

If you are a distro-hopper or enthusiast like me then a virtual machine is bliss. I am an Arch Linux user, but I keep an eye on half a dozen other distros including openSUSE, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, etc. It’s “virtually” impossible for me to have six physical machines, which waste financial resources and electricity and take up space. Instead of buying six physical machines, I would rather invest in more RAM and a multicore processor that can handle more virtual machines. Now I run almost a dozen distros (including Windows) on the same machine; and there is no downtime.........

 

http://www.linux.com...virtual-machine

 

 

Personally I love VirtualBox:

 

[raymac46]

They are fun to play with but they don't really give you the total package that a distro on the rails will do. The video and USB virtualization isn't the same as the real thing (at least so far.) Generally if you like a distro in a VM you will like it installed. If you don't like it on a VM it could be a lot better installed. I found Arch much better on a real machine.

With all the UEFI and secure boot stuff going on with Windows today, I'd rather run a VM than dual boot. Linux in a Windows VM is a nice thing to have.

Edited August 14, 2015 by raymac46

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Well if you want virtualization on your own actual hardware, there are a few options but they are not as easy as virtualbox.

 

QEMU with KVM which supports hardware virtualization to provide near native performance to the Guest Operating systems.

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