Virtual machines

For this post I wanted to try something a little different and get away from the purely text / diagram driven content. I decided to make a video using Screenr (www.screenr.com) and show off some virtual machines. If I had more time I could have probably done something more interesting with the machines, but it's still nice to have that visual aspect. Rich data is fun! So here is a link to the video I ended up creating. Below it, I'm going to highlight a couple of key security considerations about virtual machines. Enjoy!

Key takeaways

I briefly touched on some of these in the video, but it's worth writing out as well.

• Virtual machines can be used to consolidate work from several underutilized machines to one machine.
• Virtual machines can allow a company to upgrade it's systems, but still run legacy applications.
• Virtual machines can provide secure, sandbox environments for testing and debugging.
• Virtual machines can provide the illusion of hardware, or hardware configuration that you do not have.
• Virtual machines can allow you to run multiple operating systems at once.
• Virtual machines can isolate what they run, preventing damage to the host system or other environments.