HOW CAN I TRY A VIRTUAL MACHINE?
THE DOWNSIDE TO VIRTUAL MACHINES
Expense: When used for the right solutions, VMs can help individuals and companies save a lot of money. However, implementing a VM is a different case. If you’re just downloading a single VM app for your schoolwork, it probably won’t be that expensive. But building and customizing an in-house VM solution for a large company can be very pricey. Ongoing data management costs may also be higher than before (although hardware costs may be lower). In other words, it can take significant investment to adopt a widespread VM solution, and it often takes a lot of analysis of the costs and savings to make a decision.
Complexity: Choosing, managing, and maintaining VMs can also be pretty complex. Employees or students who must use a VM may have a lot of new things to learn, which can make fast-paced adoption difficult. Additionally, VMs may take more technical expertise, including experience that current IT specialists may not have.
Limitations: Not all computers or operating systems can support virtual machines. This is especially true of older systems.
HOW CAN I TRY A VIRTUAL MACHINE?
You can download a VM yourself by finding the right apps. Here are a few common options:
- VirtualBox: VirtualBox allows you to open up a number “guest operating systems” to emulate older operating systems. It’s ideal for a first solo experimentation..
- VMWare: VMWare is more business friendly than VirtualBox, but it’s also more difficult to learn. It favors server software and a variety of server setups for downloading more complex VMs.
- Parallels 13: Parallels is an app designed for the specific purpose of running Windows 10 as a virtual machine within MacOS.
- Microsoft: Microsoft provides fee 90-day VMs to emulate older versions of IE and more, which may help with experimenting or using older software.
FUTURE OF VIRTUAL MACHINES
Expect to see a lot more VMs in the future as their use cases expand. The security qualities in particular may mean that VMs will be more common than not in the coming years.
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