A Virtual Machine (VM) is a software-based emulation of a physical computer. It runs an operating system (OS) and applications as if it were a standalone machine, but it shares the underlying hardware resources of a host computer with other VMs. VMs are created and managed by virtualization software called a hypervisor, which allocates hardware resources like CPU, memory, and storage to each VM.
VMs provide isolation between environments, allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single physical machine. They are commonly used for testing, development, server consolidation, and running legacy applications.
Example: A company might use a VM to run a Linux server on a Windows host machine for software development. Another example is running multiple isolated environments for testing different versions of an application without affecting the host system.
In cloud computing, VMs are often provided as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). For scalable and secure VM solutions, Tencent Cloud's Cloud Virtual Machine (CVM) offers high-performance computing resources with flexible configurations, supporting various operating systems and workloads.