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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

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Q&A Why do you need virtual machines in these examples? [closed]

I added the numbering. It's a virtual machine. Basically, it's one or more computers pretending to be one or more computers. Believe it or not, this is incredibly useful. Say you have som...

0 answers  ·  posted 4y ago by TextKit‭  ·  closed 4y ago by Alexei‭

Question algorithms
#2: Question closed by user avatar Alexei‭ · 2021-03-05T16:35:28Z (almost 4 years ago)
#1: Initial revision by user avatar TextKit‭ · 2021-03-05T07:54:58Z (almost 4 years ago)
Why do you need virtual machines in these examples?
[I added the numbering.](https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2atafo/eli5_what_is_a_vm_and_whats_the_point_of_running/ciyk19i/)

>It's a virtual machine. Basically, it's one or more computers pretending to be one or more computers. Believe it or not, this is incredibly useful.

>1. Say you have some services that are busy during the day and others that are busy at night. You need 50 computers to do each of those things. You can now do both with 50 computers by giving priority to VMs based on time of day.

1.1. If you're running some services during the day and other services during the night, then these services won't happen at different times and won't interfere with each other! Why do you need VMs to distinguish these services? 

>2. Say you have mission-critical services. You put them on some VMs hosted on a farm of computers. One of the computers has a hardware failure. Without affecting the uptime of the service, you can take the physical machine out of the farm and repair or replace it.

2.1. This sounds like uploading the mission-critical services to a cloud server? Then why do you need VMs? What if the VMs are on the computer that had crashed? 

>3. Say you have a lot of little tiny apps that don't really need much power at all. You can put them each on independent VMs, all running on one or two physical computers, saving a boatload of money on hardware.

3.1. If your "tiny apps" "don't really need much power at all", then how can you save money on hardware? Why do you need "independent VMs"?