2.1 VirtualBox

VirtualBox is Oracle’s virtual machine application. This allows us to run a virtual (guest) machine on our host computer. This in turn means that even if you are running, for example, a Windows PC you will be able to run the Linux servers required to follow along with this material.

Virtualisation also isolates our host computer from the machines that we use. This has the advantage that no matter how badly we mess up the virtual environment it will have no effect on our host computer and any change to our host computer will have no effect on the virtual machines1.

1This is not 100% true, but close enough for our purposes here.