Everything You Need to Know About Virtual Machines

A virtual machine is a “fictional,” virtual environment that looks and acts like a proper computer system. Each VM runs like any other process within your OS. In fact, you can even boot OS installer disks via these virtual environments as if you were running them in a proper OS environment. You will be able to install and run programs just as well as you would with a physical system. Your own PC acts as a host for the VM environment, with operating systems inside of VMs being guests. There are VMs where you can store a guest operating system on what is called a virtual hard drive. You don’t have to partition your own HDD to do this, of course, which is one of the reasons why people use VMs.

Virtual machines allow you to run an operating system in an app window on your desktop that behaves like a full, separate computer. You can use them play around with different operating systems, run software your main operating system can’t, and try out apps in a safe, sandboxed environment.

There are plenty of reasons to run a virtual machine. The first, and most compelling, is that you want to play: Maybe there are some other operating system you want to dabble with (cough Linux cough), but you don’t want to deal with installing another hard drive, partitioning your existing drive, or setting up your system a different way.

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Virtual machines let users emulate one operating system within another, which means you can have the best of all the software worlds. Don't stick with just what Windows or MacOS offers you, expand your horizons with some of the best virtual machines out there right now. Here are our favorites for all platforms.