Top Five Reasons To Use Virtual Machines

Five Reasons To Use Virtual Machines Using Virtualbox or VMware

Virtual machines are operating systems that run through software which enables this to take place. For example, Virtualbox or VMware allows you to run other operating systems within its program while you are running your host operating system. The reasons why you would want to use Virtual machines can be long and exhaustive. But, this section will focus on five strong points for using virtual machines. Five reasons why you may want to run virtual machines are to try new operating systems, run old operating systems where your software is compatible or you have familiarity, easily backup and move custom setups to other machines and to run Linux and Windows (or mac and other OS) at once and testing software.

Try New Operating Systems
Within minutes, you can setup a new virtual machine and test out various operating systems. For Linux users, there are so many varied distros that you may want to have many virtual machines since they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Run Old Operating Systems
You could need to setup an older operating system to run software which could have compatibility issues with your current software. Now, you have the option to take advantage of old and new software. Also, you may be lost with your new operating system. Therefore, running both can help you to be more efficient with your tasks.

Easily Backup and Move Custom Setups to Other Machines
So, you like to create custom setups and want them usable on other pcs. Backing up and cloning virtual machines is very quick and easy to do. In fact, you can backup 30GB virtual machines in a few minutes while saving them to an external disk for safekeeping can be done very quickly too.

Run Linux and Windows (or Mac and other OS) At Once
For many specialists like web developers, running Linux and Windows allows you to use both operating systems at once which is very convenient. You can easily flip back and forth between Linux and Windows. Personally, I like to run Windows software in Windows while using Linux virtual machines to build scripts which use both shell and php / mySQL programming.

Testing Software
For obvious reasons, using a virtual machine is a safer method to test software that is downloaded from the Internet.

December 1, 2013 by kent