A traditional virtual machine represents the hardware-level virtualization. In essence, it's a complete, virtualized physical machine with BIOS and an operating system installed. It runs on top of the host operating system. Your Java application runs in the virtualized environment as it would normally do on your own machine. There are a lot of advantages from using virtual machines for your applications. Each virtual machine can have a totally different operating system; those can be different Linux flavors, Solaris, or Windows, for example. Virtual machines are also very secure by definition; they are totally isolated, complete operating systems in a box.
However, nothing comes without a price. ...
