Virtual Machines

Virtualization is a handy way to run and experiment with other operating systems or make test installations of Linux. You can also use it to test some suspicious software.

What this means is that you have an other operating system running in a virtual machine. From its own point of view it is like a native installation of operating system. It runs in its own sandbox using virtual hardware. Virtual machine manager can usually handle several virtual machines running simultaneously.

Running Windows in virtual machine is totally different than Wine. Wine runs Windows programs on your Linux environment. Windows in virtual machine is controlled by VM manager and by default have no access to your host operating system (although you may configure it to have such access).

There are several Virtual Machine managers available for Linux, e.g.

• VMWare
• VirtualBox
• qemu