The digital world progresses further and further, with many incredible advancements in the tech industry. These innovations are making a huge impact on lives all across the globe in many different realms, including the ones that might not be intuitive.
Obviously accessing and attaining information has never been easier than now, but that is hardly the ceiling. Entertainment industries are utilizing brand new tech on a daily basis, including in areas one might not expect, such as casinos.
In the casino industry, the proliferation of innovative crypto slots and other exciting games has made gambling more attractive and accessible. These games provide greater transparency and randomness, which not only optimizes user experience but also propels the use of blockchain – via crypto-powered payments.
While these innovations are great, they are often time built on fundamentals, and the VMs or Virtual Machines certainly qualify as that. They play an indispensable role in the digital world, serving as sort of a replacement to the traditional physical machines/computers. Below we will go over what Virtual Machines are, and why they are considered so important.
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What Is a Virtual Machine
Well, by the official definition, a VM represents a computer system created using software on one physical computer in order to replicate the functionality of another separate physical computer. To make it clearer, let us use an example.
Imagine a windows computer, with its unique set of Hardware including RAM, Storage, as well as CPU. Obviously, windows operating system controls this hardware, and utilizes it in proper ways to run the computer, and function in general. Finally, on top of the windows OS, there are applications, developed by a plethora of different people, all run via the OS.
If we wanted to use a Linux tools, on this computer, we would need a whole different physical copy of a machine, with its own set of hardware, as well as the Linux Operating system, as opposed to the windows OS, of course if VMs did not exist.
With Virtual machines, there is no need to purchase a separate physical computer, as they allow you to utilize both Linux and Windows, as well as Mac Os on one device, as long as you have the hardware resources. By hardware resources, it means that for example if windows is utilizing four out of the total 8 GBs of RAM, the rest can go to a different clients created by the VMs, but at the same time they cannot go overboard the actual physical limit instilled by the Hardware itself.
Regardless though, the concept of Virtualization, in simple terms allows you to stack different services on top of each other, eliminating the need of a separate hardware. This is achieved through Hypervisors, which combine many Virtual computers into a singular physical copy.
Type two and Type one Hypervisors
Type two hypervisor would be similar to one described above, a connecting tissue of a hardware, a physical computer, various clients and the virtual machine. These hypervisors are most commonly used in Personal computers, in the cases described. They are also commonly referred to as hosted hypervisors.
Type 1 hypervisors also act in a similar way, with a major difference of connecting the hardware directly to the hypervisor, as opposed to an actual physical computer. Also referred to as Bare Metal hypervisors, type 1 is more often used in various companies. Popular type 1 hypervisors are Microsoft Hyper V, as well as VMware ESXi.
Bare Metal hypervisors are essential for massive digital infrastructures, as they connect Virtual Machines to a singular server, while not allowing potential hackers to break the entire structure through compromising one VM.
Benefits of using Virtual Machines
Speaking of VMs though, let us discuss why they played such a massive role in the infrastructure, for such a long time by mentioning some benefits. Naturally, the avoidance of the need to purchase additional hardware, and having it be virtualized is extremely convenient financially, and as a whole.
This specific component only gets larger when taking into consideration the type one hypervisors, and how they offer incredible flexibility and efficiency as separate instances can choose exactly how much hardware resources, their VM may need for a specific job. This obviously makes it so that all the hardware is utilized in full affect, and that no individual party is using up too much.
Another notable piece of info, is the fact that since virtualization makes entire OS systems into portable files, you can make countless backups and fail safes, in cases of losing a copy of an OS file. This is incredibly useful and offers a completely new layer of safety and security, as opposed to the physical, less versatile alternatives. This concept of having a portable OS is called the abstraction of the Operating System from the hardware.
Back to hosted hypervisors though, they are also offer quite a bit of security. The virtual machines created by the hypervisors are always separated, which may not seem like a good thing at first, but is actually quite convenient as in cases of one of the VMs being hacked, or destroyed, the host, or the physical copy would not be affected, and the problem can be easily fixed by deleting and re-creating a new VM.
