April 26, 2021
You may have heard of virtual machines before, or maybe you haven't and you are curious. As the name implies, a virtual machine is the virtualization of a computer. Virtual machines may be useful for testing suspicious programs, or just testing out different operating systems. Virtual machines can be fairly resource intensive, so if you have less than a quad-core processor, you might not have a good experience.
Some of the most popular virtual machine softwares include VirtualBox, QEMU, VMware, and the Hyper-V(on Windows Pro and Windows server). I would recommend VirtualBox or QEMU because they are both free and open source. VirtualBox is probably the most popular and easy-to-use virtual machine software, so it is what we are going to use for this tutorial.
First, you need to download VirtualBox(I'm going to assume you know how to install it). You also need to download an ISO image of the installation disc for your preferred operating system. If you want somewhere to start, you could download an Ubuntu ISO.
Next, you need to open VirtualBox and hit the new button(it might prompt you to create a VM the first time you open it). Then you have to give it a name, for this tutorial I will name it Ubuntu. It should detect the operating system by the name you give it, but if it doesn't select the correct one and click next.
After that it will ask about memory size. The amount of memory you give it will depend on how smooth of an experience you want and how much memory you have. As a starting point I would put 2048 MB. Then you have to create a hard disk. Leave the file type at VDI, and dynamically allocated. A good amount of storage would probably be 64 gigabytes, because you will want have plenty of room for programs.
After you click create, you need to click start and it will prompt for the installation disk image you downloaded. Once you click start and follow through the installation process, you are done! You created your first VM! If you want a walk-through of the Ubuntu installation process you can check out my article here.