Virtual Machine

A virtual machine, or VM, is a self-contained virtualization of an operating system (OS).

VMs provide easy provisioning, high availability, and maintainability. An example of a VM is DigitalOcean’s Droplet, which is a Linux VM.

There are two types of VM:

• A process virtual machine, or process VM, is a platform-independent environment which allows users to run multiple separate computer architectures or operating systems (OS) within one hardware.
• A system virtual machine, or system VM, is a fully-virtualized VM of a real machine, where the VM includes an entire operating system (OS).