Virtual Machine

A computer as emulated in software. A virtual machine can be installed on a computer and used to host another "guest" operating system. This is useful when you have limited access to hardware or do not want to set up different operating systems on different partitions of the same hard disk. Developers are probably the main users of virtual machine software as they often need to test their software in different environments.

The term "virtual machine" is also used to describe the interpreters for programming languages that are compiled to an intermediate format such as Java's bytecode. You might have heard of the JVM - the Java Virtual Machine.

Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console is also a virtual machine - or several virtual machines - designed to emulate the machines legacy games ran on in the past, such as the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Megadrive (or Genesis).

Examples of virtual machine software include VirtualBox, VMware and Microsoft Virtual PC.

See ALL glossary entries