Gadgetory

hey everyone today we are talking about virtual machines and virtualization I'm joined by Patrick stone hello who knows a lot about this stuff so pretty cool stuff first off what is a virtual machine so a virtual machine is a software creation that uses your computer's hardware to create a computer inside your computer computer section yes sir virtual machines are actually really functionally useful yeah absolutely and virtualization basically as you're saying if you want to do it with Linux or Windows or whatever you basically you have your host platform and then you install some software normally to do a virtual machine VirtualBox Oracle's VirtualBox is good to use Microsoft has one called virtual PC and the one that I think that I probably use more often than not is the VMware VMware Player or workstation Pro that those are all good softwares and you can download and try any of them so trying this is a must you gotta try so let's let's before we going deep on any of these individual things let's talk about the top level why you'd make a virtual machines yeah good question yeah the the main reason for me is trying operating systems people are always asking me about the latest version of Windows or Windows server thing and rather than taking a machine and wiping the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system I just pop open my virtual machine build right like VMware Workstation or VMware Player and I say create new VM and it just takes up some hard drive space which is fine and then I just build the operating system on there which is just the same as installing the OS on an actual machine and I have a test environment alternatively you could let windows 10 install itself repeatedly even though you've told it to stop that's an alternative and it's not frustrating at all Microsoft so yes that is certainly one use one of the uses that I have is as a web admin of a server you want to really isolate your upload your FTP SCP environment from your main system that you use every day because whether or not you're a good competent computer user the cross site scripting means that you can get a virus from pretty much anywhere yeah and if you upload files to your own server what you want to do is isolate on a virtual machine do your FTP or SCP through there if you're running Windows and that will help make sure that there's no sort of like or wormhole opening that a virus can jump through to get to a protocol to your server and infect your server yeah I mean malicious software can pretty complicated and you why created an opportunity if you don't have to right and then on the more user side there's of course downloading of things from the internet things so if you download things from sites that end in orange then you generally you do want to be a bit careful obviously obviously we can't condone any type of certain type of downloading but if you are downloading stuff and you want to give yourself an extra buffer yeah it's just like a protection zone often referred to as like a sandbox a testing area one more good use for virtual machines and this is often times done in the business world is compatibility and you might have a custom built software program that a company has that was made for them and it was made when we were using Windows XP and now everybody's with Windows 7 and our software that we paid ten thousand dollars that develop doesn't work on Windows 7 right well crap oh nevermind we got virtualization yeah so there's lots of uses for virtualization yeah and although you can technically go through like properties in advance and try and force a compatibility mode doesn't always work doesn't always work especially with games where you there's all these weird visual artifacts and things like that so you're running old games that aren't available remade through Steam or good old games or whatever that's a good use for it agreed and then going what's what's your next one well so I'm thinking like how do we make this thing work right well what was it required to make virtualization work your CPUs got a support virtualization right and one of the one of the little things that can sometimes catch you is that if you go to your motherboards bios and you check on the settings for your CPU you'll see some virtualization technologies like VT x4 vtd and you need to want to you you want to make sure that those things are turned on enabled and set it isn't it and that's like kind of step one and then one step two would be just like going into your machine and downloading some type of virtualization software and then step three is start trying stuff because it's a sandbox and the most beautiful thing about virtualization is it didn't work oh well delete uh-huh that's it you just allocate some disk space and if I mean that's that's really the whole point of them is that it's not something you're attached to mm-hmm so if it goes wrong or if you're a buyer your system virtual system gets nuked by viruses or whatever you just delete it and it's gone you've just done the most thorough virus cleansing possible by deleting its host environment yeah and another cool thing too is that virtual machines are very portable like if you want to take your virtual machine to another location you just take the virtual machine file put it on the flash drive walk drive fly whatever take a train to wherever you're going and then when you get to your destination load the same software the virtual machine player on that other computer take your flash drive plug it in oh look I have mounted the same virtual machine that I was using at home that's a really good point actually because if you have a development or production environment you travel a lot or you've got a company that puts you in front of different computers every week whatever that would be a good use case for that now one thing to note is virtual machines are more demanding than just a normal host true so if you're trying to play games or something on this really not a good idea yeah yeah so have this concept in mind there's a host operating system and then there's a guest operating system the virtual machines are the guest operating systems you allocate resources from your hardware to the guest operating systems so if your host operating system let's say it's Windows 7 you're going to need like 2 gigs of RAM for Windows 7 and you're going to need 2 or for your CPU let's say you've got a quad-core CPU though and you've got 16 gigs of RAM right all right you can you can say one core goes to the host OS and two gigs go to the host OS and then you can allocate another core and another two gigs to another guest OS and another quarter note to gig so I guess twice so you can still do that but then think about this if you want to run games like you're talking about especially triple-a titles those things are gonna take up lots of resources so now all of a sudden this single guest OS has taken up tons of resources if you're trying to run a hardcore game on a virtual machine right so there's just operating overhead - yeah and so we're talking about game we're talking about you know mostly making older games work or maybe making a Linux game work in a Linux environment when you're we have a Windows rest PC or vice versa - if you prefer to run on Linux this is something a lot of you have asked about is look what about Linux gaming yeah well if you do really want to help Linux gaming I guess you know you unfortunately have to sacrifice some compatibility with Windows and just install Linux yeah but if you get stuck there's things like wine in the past has sort of worked to neutralize the environment get these things working or you can do the virtual machine approach and this is another great point about virtualization virtualization is cross-platform so whether I'm using VMware or VirtualBox on a Mac or a Linux box or a Windows box to the virtual machine it all looks the same right now to the host operating system it looks very different but to the virtual machine it's like that a virtual machine I got what I got that should be a medium tall machine so a couple very good use is there virus isolation is always the easiest one for me to point toward that's certainly what we use to avoid contamination of environments if you're testing stuff maybe you're doing that's me right testing software you're doing a sort of free IT work for friends and you want to test up there that's a good place to do it too so you don't screw something up that you haven't recovered exactly this what if someone is there another top level use we can go through so those are really the main things when you're talking about you know may things compatible and then in addition like maybe working on things that were older and my safe zones yeah and and so security test environment making things compatible those are really the main things you're going to write virtual machines yeah so if you want more information a link to the description below and patreon link professional video to help us out directly thank you for watching let us know if you have questions on this stuff and we'll try and do a version 2 and get a full series going but yeah pretty cool stuff very easy to get in to check out virtual machines VMware Oracle's VirtualBox VirtualBox Windows virtual PC Windows virtual pc as your starting points so we will see you all next time