Virtual Machines give us the freedom of choice no matter what operating system sits on top of our hardware. Yes, you can do both on OS X, but Linux or FreeBSD generally provides a better environment for server like functions. Microsoft hasn't released an OS X version of Visual Studio as of yet so to use the IDE I have to run Windows in a VM.Īnother example would be the need to run an ssh server like openssh-server, or a source control server like Gitolite. One of the main reasons to run a VM is to gain access to technology and functionality that does not exist in the current operating system running on our hardware.įor example, my operating system of choice is OS X, but if I want to do any serious Windows development I need to use Visual Studio. Why would we want to run a Virtual Machine?

VirtualBox sits between the two operating systems translating calls and responses between the two. What VirtualBox is really doing underneath the hood is translating the VMs systems calls to calls that the main operating system can understand. VirtualBox, and other virtualization apps, simulate hardware in a way that the virtualized operating system (the VM) thinks that it's running on real hardware. What is a Virtualization Application?ĭifferent operating systems have different processes for interacting with hardware. This is also known as running a Virtual Machine (VM). In other words, you can run a linux box (or whatever your favorite flavor of OS is) as if it were any other application inside your Windows OS, Mac OS X, or even on another Linux box. VirtualBox is a free and open source virtualization app that allows users to run multiple operating systems on their machine from within their main operating system. In order to run another operating system on my hardware I will use VirtualBox so that I can run CentOS alongside OS X.

The project requires me to use a minimal install of CentOS 7 (Linux) as the operating system. For an upcoming project and blog article, I'm going to need a Linux setup on my main machine.

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