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More advanced features-many of which are found in VirtualBox for free-require upgrading to the paid VMware Workstation program. You can use VMware Player on Windows or Linux as a free, basic virtual machine tool.

VMware Player: (Windows, Linux): VMware has their own line of virtual machine programs.

VirtualBox works very well, particularly on Windows and Linux where there’s less competition, making it a good place to start with VMs. There’s no paid version of VirtualBox, so you don’t have to deal with the usual “upgrade to get more features” upsells and nags.

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VirtualBox: (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X): VirtualBox is very popular because it’s open-source and completely free.

There are several different virtual machine programs you can choose from:

If you still need Windows XP for older apps, you could run it in a VM where at least the harm of running an old, unsupported OS is mitigated. Sandboxing also allows you to run insecure OSes more safely. RELATED: Tell Your Relatives: No, Microsoft Won't Call You About Your Computer This makes VMs a safe place to test apps-or websites-you don’t trust and see what they do.įor example, when the “Hi, we’re from Windows” scammers came calling, we ran their software in a VM to see what they would actually do-the VM prevented the scammers from accessing our computer’s real operating system and files. Software inside a VM can’t escape the VM to tamper with the rest of your system.

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RELATED: Sandboxes Explained: How They're Already Protecting You and How to Sandbox Any ProgramĪnother advantage VMs provide is that they are “ sandboxed” from the rest of your system.

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If you want to run a later version of Windows-like Windows 10-but have older apps that only run on XP, you could install Windows XP into a VM. For example, as a Linux or Mac user, you could install Windows in a VM to run Windows apps you might not otherwise have access to. VMs also provide a way to run another OS’ software. When you’re done playing with an OS, you can just delete the VM. For example, they are a great way to mess around with Linux-or a new Linux distribution-and see if it feels right for you. They allow you to experiment with another OS without having to install it on your physical hardware. Why You’d Want to Create a Virtual MachineĪside from being good geeky fun to play around with, VMs offer a number of serious uses. Each VM eats up some CPU time, RAM, and other resources.

You can also run multiple VMs at the same time, but you’ll find yourself somewhat limited by your system resources.

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As you can see, we’ve got full VMs with several versions of Windows and Ubuntu installed. Here’s a peek at some of the VMs we use when testing things out while writing articles. The limit to how many VMs you can have are really just limited by the amount of hard drive space. RELATED: 4+ Ways to Run Windows Software on Linux Demanding games or other apps that require serious graphics and CPU power don’t really do so well, so virtual machines aren’t the ideal way to play Windows PC games on Linux or Mac OS X-at least, not unless those games are much older or aren’t graphically demanding. Virtualization does add some overhead, so don’t expect them to be as fast as if you had installed the operating system on real hardware. This means you won’t have to mess around with partitioning or doing anything else complicated with your real hard drive. The VM app presents this file the guest OS as a real hard drive.

In a particular VM, the guest OS is stored on a virtual hard drive-a big, multi-gigabyte file stored on your real hard drive. It helps keep things from getting too confusing. In the VM world, the operating system actually running on your computer is called the host and any operating systems running inside VMs are called guests.