How to make a Virtual Machine (VM)

A Virtual Machine behaves like a separate computer system having its own virtualized hardware and virtual hard drive. It allows for experimentation with different operating systems and suspicious applications or files in a sandboxed environment protecting the host computer.

Virtual Machine Vocabulary:

Guest – the OS that the VM is running
Host – the OS that the host computer is running
Hypervisor – the software that creates and runs the VMs
Type 1 hypervisor – runs as a lightweight operating system so there
are more resources for VMs to use
Type 2 hypervisor – runs as a software layer on an operating system

In this tutorial we will be using a type 2 hypervisor VirtualBox which can be downloaded using the following link https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. You will need to install the version that corresponds to your operating system.

Step 1 — Click on Machine and select New

Step 2 — Fill in what the VM will be called and change the Type and Version to match the operating system you are going to be using in it

Step 3 — Select how much RAM will be allocated to the VM (1000 MB = 1 Gigabyte)

16384 is the total RAM of my system

Step 4—Select if you want add a virtual hard disk to your system

Options:
  Do not add a virtual hard disk - Use this if you want to live boot the 
  operating system
  Create a virtual hard disk now - Use this if you want the VM to be 
  persistent
  Use an existing virtual hard disk file - Use this option if you 
  are given a virtual hard disk file to use

If you do not know what option to choose select Create a virtual hard disk now

Step 5 — Select the hard disk file type

Options:
  VDI(VirtualBox Disk Image) - custom VirtualBox container format
  VHD(Virtual Hard Disk) - container format used by Microsoft
  VMDK(Virtual Hard Disk)- container format that is used by other 
  virtualization products

Link for Oracle® VM VirtualBox documentation on the different hard disk file types
https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/user/vdidetails.html

Step 6 — Select if the virtual hard disk should be dynamically allocated or fixed size

Step 7 — Select the virtual hard disk size (use more then 20 Gigabytes)

Step 8 — Double click on the new Virtual Machine you created and select the start-up disk, the file should be an ISO and have the extension .iso

Congratulations who have now created a virtual machine using VirtualBox