Time to read: 10 minutes 40 seconds | Published: July 7, 2025
Virtual Machine What is Virtual Machine?
A virtual machine (VM) is a software-based abstraction of a physical computer system, designed to emulate the functionality of a standalone computing environment. By decoupling hardware resources (such as CPU, memory, storage, and network interfaces) from the software layer, virtualization technology enables multiple independent and isolated virtualized instances to coexist on the same physical infrastructure, running operating systems and applications independently.
- Explanation of Virtual Machines (VMs)
- What are the benefits of virtual machines?
- What are the types of virtual machines?
- How does a virtual machine work?
- What are the use cases and applications of virtual machines?
- What are the future trends of virtual machines?
- How does HPE help you with virtual machines solutions?
Explanation of Virtual Machines (VMs)
A virtual machine (VM) is a software-defined abstraction of a physical computer that provides a fully isolated and emulated computing environment. This emulation includes virtualized CPU, memory, storage, and network interfaces, all managed by a specialized software layer called a hypervisor. The hypervisor allocates and schedules physical resources from the underlying hardware to the VM, enabling it to function as if it were an independent physical machine. Each VM operates with its own guest operating system, complete with a virtualized BIOS/EFI, kernel, and device drivers, which interact with virtual hardware layers. These virtual hardware layers translate operations performed within the VM into actions on the physical host components. This architecture ensures strong isolation between VMs, allowing multiple instances to coexist securely and efficiently on the same physical system.
What are the benefits of virtual machines?
There are several benefits of using virtual machines in many areas of IT infrastructure management:
- Scalability: Virtual machines can scale processing resources up or down in response to demand, easily adding or removing VMs without requiring new hardware.
- Portability: VMs can be replicated and moved across servers and data centers, enabling workload balancing, disaster recovery, and seamless transfers.
- Flexibility: Virtualization supports running multiple operating systems and applications on a single physical server, efficiently using resources and accommodating various workloads.
- Security: VMs enhance security through isolation, reducing the risk of virus infections and breaches spreading across the system.
- Agility and speed: Virtualization allows rapid provisioning and deployment of VMs, significantly reducing setup time for new servers and applications, enabling faster innovation and response to business needs.
- Reduced downtime: Virtualization supports live migration and high availability, minimizing downtime during maintenance or hardware failures, and ensuring continuous service.
- Cost efficiency: By consolidating multiple VMs on fewer physical servers, organizations save on hardware and energy costs, while also reducing operating expenses through streamlined management.
What are the types of virtual machines?
Virtual machines (VMs) can be categorized into different types based on their purpose, functionality, and the level of access they provide to the underlying hardware.
- System virtual machines are one primary type, providing a complete system environment that supports the execution of a full operating system (OS). These VMs emulate a physical machine, allowing multiple OS instances to run simultaneously on a single physical host. Examples include hypervisor-based VMs such as VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine). These hypervisors can be further divided into bare-metal (Type 1) hypervisors, which run directly on the host’s hardware, and hosted (Type 2) hypervisors, which run on top of an existing operating system.
- Process virtual machines, also known as application VMs, are designed to run a single application or process, providing a platform-independent environment. These VMs ensure compatibility across different operating systems by offering an isolated environment for running individual applications.
How does a virtual machine work?
Virtual machines (VMs) operate by leveraging a hypervisor to abstract and manage physical hardware resources, enabling multiple isolated environments to run on the same physical host. Here's a simplified step-by-step explanation:
1. Hardware Abstraction
The hypervisor acts as a middle layer between the physical hardware and virtual machines, creating a virtualized hardware environment. It provides:
- Virtual CPUs (vCPUs): Schedules and translates VM CPU instructions to physical CPUs using context switching techniques.
- Virtual Memory: Maps virtual memory to physical memory while ensuring isolation between VMs.
- Virtual Storage: Emulates physical storage (e.g., hard drives) as virtual disks, often represented as files on the host system.
- Virtual Network: Creates virtual network interfaces (vNICs) for VMs, connecting them to physical or virtual networks.
2. Guest OS Boot Process
When a VM is powered on, the hypervisor initializes virtual hardware, and hands control to the guest operating system. The guest OS boots as if it were running on a physical machine:
- The virtual BIOS/EFI starts the boot sequence.
- The guest OS kernel detects and initializes the virtual hardware.
- Drivers for virtual devices are loaded, enabling user-space processes to start.
3. Instruction Execution
The hypervisor translates and facilitates instructions from the guest OS to physical hardware using several techniques:
- Binary Translation: Converts privileged instructions into safe operations for the host system.
- Hardware-Assisted Virtualization: Modern CPUs (e.g., Intel VT-x, AMD-V) optimize virtualization by trapping and executing privileged instructions directly.
- Paravirtualization: In some cases, the guest OS interacts directly with the hypervisor to improve performance.
4. Resource Management
The hypervisor dynamically allocates and optimizes physical resources for VMs based on demand:
- Overcommitment: Allocates more virtual resources (e.g., CPUs, memory) than physically available, assuming not all VMs will fully utilize their allocations simultaneously.
- Live Migration: Moves running VMs between physical hosts without downtime, ensuring balanced resource usage and fault tolerance.
5. I/O Virtualization
When a VM performs input/output (I/O) operations (e.g., disk reads, writes, or network communication), the hypervisor intercepts these requests and translates them into physical hardware actions. Virtual device drivers within the guest OS facilitate this process seamlessly.
In conclusion
Virtual machines work by virtualizing hardware resources through a hypervisor, enabling guest operating systems to function independently of the physical host. The hypervisor ensures efficient resource allocation, security, and isolation, making VMs versatile for running multiple workloads on shared infrastructure.
What are the use cases and applications of virtual machines?
Virtual machines (VMs) offer versatile use cases across various industries and IT environments by emulating physical hardware.
- Development and testing environments: VMs enable developers to create isolated environments for development, testing, and debugging without affecting production. They allow quick setup of different operating systems and configurations, facilitate testing, and enable snapshots and rollbacks, making development efficient and low-risk.
- Disaster recovery and backup: VMs are vital for disaster recovery by replicating and backing up VMs to off-site locations, ensuring business continuity with quick recovery options, reducing downtime, and simplifying system restoration. VMs also extend the lifespan of legacy applications, avoiding costly rewrites and ensuring compatibility with modern hardware.
- Cloud computing: VMs are fundamental in cloud computing, where service providers offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This allows users to manage virtual servers in the cloud, providing scalable, flexible resources, enabling pay-as-you-go models, and supporting multi-tenant architectures.
- Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI): VDI deploys virtual desktops for consistent user experiences for remote and mobile users, centralizing management, enhancing security, supporting remote work, and simplifying updates and patches.
- Application isolation and security: VMs isolate applications, reducing security risks, preventing conflicts, and allowing secure testing of suspicious software. Best practices include patching, secure configurations, isolation, segmentation, and continuous monitoring.
- Malware analysis and isolation: Security experts employ virtual computers to analyze and confine malware securely. By executing potentially hazardous software in isolated virtual environments, researchers can analyze its behavior without damaging the host system.
- Secure access & running incompatible software: Virtual computers offer a secure environment for accessing the internet or running potentially dangerous apps.
- Load balancing and high availability: VMs support load balancing and high availability by distributing workloads across multiple servers, improving performance and providing redundancy in case of failures.
- Research and experimentation: VMs enable controlled environments for experiments and simulations, providing flexibility for various configurations, easy rollback, and isolation of setups.
- Resource allocation and management: Effective resource allocation is crucial for VM performance. Utilizing tools and techniques for managing resources ensures optimization and avoids contention.
- Orchestration: VMs must be scalable to meet demands. Orchestration tools like Kubernetes and OpenStack automate management, enhance efficiency, and support integration with containerization technologies.
- Licensing and compliance: VM deployment involves licensing implications for operating systems and applications. Compliance with software and hardware agreements and regulatory standards is essential to avoid penalties.
What are the future trends of virtual machines?
- Integration with Cloud-Native Technologies
Virtual machines (VMs) are evolving to seamlessly integrate with cloud-native technologies like containers and orchestration platforms. They remain essential in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, providing infrastructure for containerized workloads while ensuring security and isolation. Enhanced APIs and automation frameworks simplify the provisioning, scaling, and migration of VMs, enabling their continued relevance as organizations transition to cloud-native architectures.
2. Increasing Role of VMs in Edge Computing
VMs are critical in edge computing, where workloads are moved closer to their data source, such as IoT devices and smart city applications. While containers dominate due to their lightweight design, VMs are preferred in scenarios needing strong isolation, legacy application support, or diverse OS requirements. Lightweight VM technologies are reducing resource overhead and startup times, ensuring VMs remain an efficient choice for edge workloads that demand flexibility and security.
3. Enhanced Security in Virtualized Environments
VMs are adopting advanced hardware-assisted security features like Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), memory encryption, and secure enclaves to protect sensitive data and computations. Confidential computing is ensuring that data remains encrypted even during processing. These advancements make VMs suitable for high-security workloads in industries with strict regulatory requirements.
4. VM Optimization for AI and Machine Learning
AI and machine learning workloads require high-performance environments, and VMs are being optimized for GPU acceleration and hardware pass-through technologies like Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). These features enable VMs to efficiently handle compute-intensive tasks like AI model training and inference while maintaining scalability and isolation.
5. Automation and AI-Powered Management
AI and automation are transforming VM management. Predictive analytics and machine learning are enabling hypervisors to optimize resource allocation, anticipate workload demands, and automate live migrations for minimal downtime. AI-driven monitoring tools provide real-time insights, improving scalability and reducing administrative overhead.
6. Sustainability and Green Computing
VMs are contributing to sustainability by adopting energy-efficient virtualization techniques. Power-aware scheduling and resource optimization reduce energy consumption, while enhanced monitoring tools track and minimize the carbon footprint of VMs. These efforts align virtualization technology with green computing goals.
7. Integration and Convergence of Virtual Machines with Cloud-Native Technologies
Virtual machines (VMs) are evolving to integrate seamlessly with cloud-native technologies like containers and orchestration platforms. In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, they provide secure, isolated, and diverse operating system support for containerized workloads. Enhanced APIs and automation tools have improved VM provisioning, scaling, and migration, ensuring their continued relevance in cloud-native architectures.
Simultaneously, the convergence of VMs and containers is fostering unified platforms that leverage the strengths of both. VMs offer robust isolation and OS diversity, while containers provide lightweight portability and rapid deployment.
How does HPE help you with virtual machines solutions?
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software:
- Simplified virtualization management: HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software aims to streamline the complexities of managing virtual machines, especially in heterogeneous environments. It includes a new enterprise grade, supported hypervisor (HVM), based on the proven KVM hypervisor, along with the ability to manage both HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and VMware vSphere clusters. This eliminates the need for administrators to switch between different management consoles, saving time and reducing the learning curve. This unified approach can lead to cost savings by reducing training needs and simplifying operations.
- Unified management: This feature allows you to integrate your existing VMware clusters into the VM Essentials platform, free of charge. This means you can manage VMs running on your existing ESXi hosts alongside VMs running on the HVM hypervisor, all from the same interface. This centralized control vastly simplifies VM vending, and other management tasks.
- Flexible consumption model: HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software is available in two ways: as standalone software that you can install and manage yourself, or as an integrated component of one of the HPE Private Cloud solutions such as HPE Private Cloud Business Edition. This flexibility allows you to choose the deployment model that best suits your needs and existing infrastructure.
HPE Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE):
- Agile, self-service private cloud: HPE Private Cloud Business Edition is designed to provide the agility and self-service capabilities of a public cloud within your own data center. It enables users to quickly provision and manage their own resources (including VMs) through a self-service portal, without requiring IT intervention for every request. This speeds up application deployment and improves responsiveness to business needs. The Business Edition can be deployed wherever you need it – on-premises, at the edge, or in a colocation facility.
- Simplified VM management: Business Edition simplifies VM management by automating many common tasks, such as provisioning, scaling, and monitoring. It also provides tools for managing VMs across both on-premises and public cloud environments, creating a hybrid cloud experience.
- Workload-optimized private cloud: The Business Edition leverages both HPE's modern hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) at the edge, and distributed hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI) for scalability in the data center. HCI combines compute, storage, and networking resources into a single integrated system. This architecture simplifies deployment and management, and it can be optimized for specific workloads, such as VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) or databases, by tailoring the underlying hardware and software configurations. dHCI allows you to manage the system as one, with all the operational benefits, but to scale compute and storage independently.
HPE Private Cloud Enterprise:
- Streamline and modernize: HPE Private Cloud Enterprise goes beyond just VMs and provides a fully managed cloud experience for your entire private environment, including bare metal servers, containers, and VMs. It helps you modernize your IT infrastructure by providing a consistent platform for both traditional and cloud-native applications. This allows you to consolidate your IT environment and reduce complexity.
- Fully managed cloud experience: With Private Cloud Enterprise, HPE takes on the responsibility for managing your private cloud infrastructure, including hardware maintenance, software updates, and 24/7 support. This frees up your IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as developing new applications and services. You get the benefits of a cloud-like experience without having to manage the underlying infrastructure.
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software:
- HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software is a powerful hybrid cloud management platform that unifies virtual machine, container, and cloud-native workload operations across private and public clouds. Designed to streamline IT operations, it offers a self-service portal, automated provisioning, and full lifecycle management with built-in governance, cost analytics, and policy enforcement. With native integration into ITSM, CI/CD, and identity systems, Morpheus enables consistent, secure, and scalable infrastructure orchestration. It supports a wide range of hypervisors—including VMware, Nutanix, and KVM—and is ideal for enterprises modernising their virtual estates or navigating vendor transitions.
- For organisations starting with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, the platform offers a seamless upgrade path to the full Morpheus Enterprise license. VM Essentials delivers core virtualisation capabilities with a built-in KVM hypervisor and is optimised for cost-effective deployment on HPE and third-party hardware. As needs evolve, customers can unlock advanced features such as Kubernetes support, multi-cloud governance, FinOps, and complex workflow automation by upgrading to Morpheus Enterprise—without replatforming. This flexibility ensures that businesses can scale their operations confidently while maintaining continuity and maximising ROI.