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Tech & ITVM (Virtual Machine)
By Sitraka Forler · Lecturer, Durham Business SchoolUpdated 13 September 2026 About this site
A computer simulated in software, with its own operating system, on a physical host.
A virtual machine runs a full guest operating system on virtual hardware, while a hypervisor such as VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V shares one physical server between many VMs. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds rent you VMs, so you patch their operating system yourself. Unlike a container, a VM does not share the host kernel (the operating system's core): heavier to run, but more strongly isolated.