-: Welcome to this section on virtualization.
Up to this point in the course,
we've talked about a lot of different types
of hackers and malicious software
that are attempting to affect our systems.
Then, we started talking about
how you can secure your hardware.
And in the last section,
we discussed securing your operating system.
Now, we're going to talk about how you can use virtualization
to emulate your physical hardware
in order for you to run an operating system
in a protected and sandboxed environment.
First, let's define virtualization.
Virtualization is the creation of a virtual resource.
Now, I know that's pretty broad,
but that's because virtualization itself
is a broad category.
We can virtualize anything.
This includes servers, desktops, file systems,
hard drives, and even an entire network.
The most common use of virtualization these days
is the use of a virtual machine.
A virtual machine is a container
that contains an emulated computer
that can run an entire operating system inside of it.
This includes emulation of all of the hardware
that's required to run the system.
This means you have the hard drives,
the optical drives, video cards, processors,
and even the BIOS being emulated.
Later in this section, I'm going to show you in a demonstration
how to install Windows 10 inside of a virtual machine
that's going to be hosted
on a Mac OS X-powered desktop computer.
Now, there are two main types of virtual machines:
system virtual machines and processor virtual machines.
A system virtual machine is a complete platform
that's designed to take the place of an entire computer.
That means you can run
the entire operating system virtually,
just like I'm going to show you
with my Windows 10 example later on.
A processor virtual machine, on the other hand,
is designed to run a single application.
Often, this is used to run something like a web browser
or possibly even a simple web server.
Virtualization is important to both
the security of our on-premise and our virtual servers,
because it's heavily used by both of those.
Virtualization has continued to increase in recent years,
helping to reduce the need for additional power,
space, and cooling for our server rooms
and our data centers,
and thereby reducing the physical architecture involved
in supporting our IT operations.