Virtualization As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
1,086 words · ~5 min read
0:00
as much as many of us would like to escape our mundane lives for something a
0:03
little more Fantastical the concept of
0:06
virtual reality is still a little ways away from completely fooling our brains
0:11
into thinking we're actually in Middle Earth or whatever but for your computer
0:17
it's pretty simple to fool it into thinking that a fake virtual environment
0:22
is the real deal I'm talking of course about
0:26
virtualization which has become a really useful tool for home users and it Pros
0:32
alike but what the heck is it well in a general sense it means putting layers of
0:38
software between your computer's hardware and some other software that
0:43
you're trying to run but more commonly it means running one operating system on
0:48
top of another one on top of another one on top of another one exception uh no
0:52
usually it's one layer and then more operating systems so you've probably
0:56
seen this in the form of running one version of Windows as a virtual machine
1:00
or a VM inside a window in a newer
1:04
version this has all sorts of realworld applications but before we get into this
1:09
it helps to understand something about how your computer achieves this you see
1:14
your computer grants different pieces of software different privileges depending
1:19
on what they are your operating system has a lot more privileges than regular
1:24
programs like being able to directly access Hardware like your memory or your
1:28
CPU the idea being to stop malicious
1:31
applications from attacking your system or crashing it because of this early
1:35
virtualization software that was forced to run as a regular program without
1:40
privileged access to Hardware directly
1:44
had to translate the actual instruction set of the processor which you can learn
1:48
about here by the way so that the virtual OS could actually make any use
1:53
of it or as an alternative you can install a small program called a
1:56
hypervisor as the main OS on the computer then virtualize your main OS
2:01
like Linux or Windows or whatever else on top of that to actually run programs
2:06
but because of the overhead involved with translating instructions this
2:11
resulted in some serious slowdowns in terms of performance but in the mid
2:16
2000s both AMD and Intel started making
2:20
processors that natively supported virtual machines allowing a hypervisor
2:25
to run below the layer where an OS would
2:29
usually be which means that the system wouldn't have to spend time translating
2:34
instructions enabling much faster near
2:37
native performance okay lonus so that's a lot of technical talk about
2:41
hypervisors and layers and onions or whatever else but what does that mean
2:44
for me can I actually use this stuff well yeah actually if you have older
2:50
games you still love that just won't play nicely on your modern 64-bit
2:54
operating system you can run an old 32bit version of Windows in a virtual
2:59
machine and play to your heart's content cool right VMS are also useful for
3:04
testing new software or even like a
3:07
website that you're not sure whether it contains malware or not because you can
3:11
just delete the entire virtual machine without touching any of the important
3:16
data on your main Os or even your network if you quarantine it effectively
3:20
and speaking of your main operating system if you're thinking about
3:23
switching to something else completely different you can actually try your new
3:28
OS in a virtual machine without nuking
3:31
your existing hard drive and your existing OS not to mention compatibility
3:35
between operating systems remember parallels that I mentioned before
3:38
Windows applications on the Mac that's right and if you have important data
3:43
that you can't lose VMS are also a very easy way to back up most VM software can
3:50
take snapshots of the entire virtual system at a given point in time kind of
3:54
like an Uber system restore this capability has made it very popular on
3:59
servers which often need redundancy and
4:02
backups to ensure constant operation not to mention the fact that running
4:06
multiple virtual machines on one server
4:09
can put all of that processing power to better use as modern server Hardware is
4:14
notoriously underutilized especially if
4:17
the workloads don't natively take advantage of many processing threads at
4:22
a time but if you want to do something really cool you can virtualize your
4:26
gaming rig and turn one beastly PC into
4:29
to three virtual machines a Naas and
4:32
then two gaming boxes that two players can use at once so you can check out
4:37
this video for a practical demonstration of how it's done and the results
4:43
speaking of practical you know what's practical ifixit.com the world's free
4:49
online repair manual they've got step-by-step repair and tear down guides
4:54
for all kinds of stuff like seriously they've got like 15,000 Plus for iPhones
5:01
iPads Macs computers Android phones
5:05
tablets you pretty much name it and it's
5:08
totally free with no ads or annoying
5:11
login portals or anything like that what
5:14
supports this business you might ask great question well they've also got a
5:18
line of the tools that you need in order
5:22
to perform these repairs that you can buy over on ifixit.com so they've got
5:27
that fantastic screwdriver kit that I
5:30
use all the time they've also got their
5:33
larger prot te bag that has the toolkit
5:36
along with like the magnetic screw holder and all that kind of stuff in it and all you got to do to check it out is
5:41
head over to ifixit.com tequi to a learn how to repair your
5:45
devices and get all the tools you need which by the way come with a lifetime
5:49
warranty so thanks for watching guys if you like this video do that thing if you
5:52
disliked it do the other thing check out our other channels as well we've got
5:56
some great videos over on Channel Super Fun like hot dog Olympics
6:00
whatever that is see you're curious now right you got to check it out as always
6:03
if you leave a comment below we'll try and check that out and see if we can
6:07
make a fastest Possible episode with your suggestion and as always I think
6:11
I've said as always a few times here don't forget to subscribe and follow and
6:14
all that good stuff