MCITP: Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise Administrator, Study Guide

10.4. Understanding Virtualized Machine Components

Whenever a new virtual machine is created, some necessary hardware components are allocated through the use of software emulation. Think about it. Whenever you use an individualized operating system, it has to access its own hard drive, network card, and system memory. Some of these components are vital for operation. Say, for instance, you're running an instance of SUSE Linux, and you're going to be using this instance of Linux to run a website that takes advantage of PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP). To do this, you'd need to have an individual installation that had its own network settings, memory, and disk. Imagine for a moment that this is a medium-traffic web server. The I/O operations ...