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Ishan Sharma
Ishan Sharma

Posted on • Edited on

What Is a Virtual Machine?

Hey, Devinas!

Actually, I'll be giving a talk soon enough to teach my peers the basics of Cloud Computing.

What Cloud is? What happens on the server side when you enter a URL in the address bar and hit 'enter' key? How load balancers work? Pros and Cons of cloud etc.

Between those topics, one that I'm planning to give a brief intro about is 'What is a Virtual Machine?'

I do know what a virtual machine is, how it just runs another instance of an OS on the same hardware, and how a hypervisor manages all the resources etc.

But, I'm unable to come with an easy analogy or some real-life example using which I could be able to teach them out.

Any Ideas/Suggestions ?

P.S. Also, if you'd like to join the talk and discuss a few things about cloud, feel free to registeryourself here. I'd love to learn together with you :)

Top comments (5)

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nestedsoftware profile image
Nested Software • Edited

How about the idea of taking a big old house and renovating it into a small apartment building. Each apartment will have its own stuff: entrance, mail, kitchen, bathrooms, etc. There is still about the same amount of total space, but it's organized in a way that makes it more efficient for several tenants to live in it independently.

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ishandeveloper profile image
Ishan Sharma

Thanks @nestedsoftware . I loved this analogy of yours and will definately use this one to teach my peers, during the talk! ✨

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kallmanation profile image
Nathan Kallman

A person can pretend to be someone else. If they have a good enough disguise and acting; we may not even be able to tell the difference.

Just like one person can pretend to be another; one computer can pretend to be a different computer. As long as it acts well enough, the things using it won't even know the difference.

And have you ever seen a movie where the main character needs to switch between multiple disguises? A single computer can also pretend to be multiple people! But just like the actor gets into trouble the more people they pretend to be because they spend all their time switching disguises, a computer can waste a lot of time switching if it tries to pretend to be too many other computers at once.

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ishandeveloper profile image
Ishan Sharma

Hi @kallmanation Thank you for taking out the time and coming up with that analogy. I loved it! ❤️
However I just thought that it'd be somewhat confusing for my peers to relate with this one and @nestedsoftware 's analogy is somewhat more relatable.

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mellen profile image
Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli

My first thought was "a play within a play", the same director and the same stage, but the performers are pretending they are the director and stage hands and characters.

Or is it like a parent company with a number of child companies? The parent apportions out resources to each child company, and has certain rules the child companies have to follow, but the child companies otherwise seem like independent entities.