Opensource Hypervisors and Starting Virtual Machine with Oracle Virtualbox

This article will be break down into two sessions. First session is an introduction to hypervisor and virtualization and show you the different open source hypervisors you can leverage. Second section will be focused on an example of how you can start running a first virtual machine with Oracle Virtual Box, which is an open source software for its basic version.

Hypervisor and Virtualization

If virtualization is the principle behind any cloud system, then a hypervisor is that software **enabling the virtual machine creation process. Of course, the concepts of virtualization and hypervisor can go much deeper, but, for now, let’s just say that a hypervisor is the software that emulates the physical computer machines by virtualizing the available physical layer. And you should be glad to know there are number of open source hypervisors available. But first, here is one question you should ask first.

Why do I need a virtual machine?

Broadly, there are two reasons why you might consider to get a virtual machine.

REASON 1: Using the virtual machine as workstation

If you need to use a virtual machine to test out some softwares, work on documentation or spreadsheet, or run an Interactive Development Environment (IDE), although there is a cloud based IDE called Eclipse Che, which is also an open source, you need the…