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).