Virtual Machine
تاريخ التحديث Sep 22, 2026 What Is a Virtual Machine?
A virtual machine (VM) is a program that emulates a complete computer system, with a virtual CPU, memory, and storage.
From the outside, it appears no different than a physical machine with the same hardware.
How Virtual Machines Work
A virtual machine has an operating system (OS), files, and applications. It works just like a physical computer: it can host websites, run programs, and connect to a network with other systems. If you look at it on a screen, the virtual machine appears as a window running within that computer's own OS.
It also has a CPU, memory, and storage, but these are simulated and not physical. Because of this, multiple virtual machines can coexist on one server. When this happens, the server uses a piece of software called a hypervisor to manage them. The hypervisor maps the VM's virtual hardware to the server’s physical components.
In this scenario, one physical server could run two, three, four, or even ten virtual machines. However, the number is limited by the resources of the server, since too many VMs will lead to reduced performance.
Why Virtual Machines Matter
Virtual machines are sandboxes: pieces of virtual space to run code separately from the rest of the system. This makes VMs ideal for testing new software or running possibly malicious code.
The virtual machine can run a different or older operating system to enable a user to run software that won't work on the computer's OS. For example, someone might use a VM to run a piece of Windows software on a
Linux device. To achieve this, they would use a virtual machine running a Windows OS on their Linux system.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
The nodes on the Ethereum network all run the
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is used to execute
smart contracts. Because this happens in a separate sandbox, it provides considerable security benefits for the Ethereum platform, making it more costly for hackers to conduct resource exhaustion attacks such as
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. However, this does not mean that the network is completely immune to such attacks.
The EVM has become the de facto execution standard for many blockchains beyond Ethereum, since networks that implement EVM compatibility can reuse Ethereum's tooling and developer ecosystem. Other chains have chosen different virtual machine designs:
Solana, for example, executes programs on the
Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), which uses a different instruction architecture based on the Berkeley Packet Filter model. The choice of virtual machine shapes a network's performance profile and the programming languages its developers can use.