whats the purpose of a virtual machine?

[gugughandi]

Just wondering what the purpose of a virtual machine was.. I run 9 bots and it takes like about almost 60% on my physical memory and like 50% cpu.. does a VM lessen the stress on my cpu?

 

[chinajade]

First, I'm impressed your running many bots and WoW instances on one box. I have enough problems with two.

Second, you can think of a VM as a 'sandbox' in which to place an operating system and any applications you desire. The OS and apps in the various VM sandboxes can't step on each other--they each think they are running on dedicated hardware.

A VM will consume more resources (considerably more so), than just running the multiple copies of an app and one copy of the OS like you are doing. I'd say you've got it very good.

Ref: Virtual Machine