So I was stumbling around the internet the other day and I came across a post on how to run Android on your laptop or computer from a USB stick. Basically it involves the use of an ISO disk image of Android written for the x86 processor architecture. As a computer geek I thought this was a cool concept and I wondered, could I use the Android x86 ISO file to power up a Virtual Machine on Microsoft's Virtual PC?

What is a virtual machine?

For those of you who are not within the IT world, virtual machines is one of the hottest trends that companies use to decrease the overall spend of server infrastructure by taking a physical server (host) and using it to create X number of virtual machine that share the memory, cpu and other hardware from the host. A virtual machine has its own operating system and software that is separated from the host machine. This allows a company to be able to create servers at will depending on demand by the business. A virtual machine works just like a real physical machine and only an informed user can tell the difference. Just about every company uses virtual machines to some capacity on their environments, however there are also applications for users on laptops and desktops. Most importantly the hard disk for the virtual machine is contained within a single file on the host machine which provides some great advantages to maintenance and allows IT managers to easily move a virtual machine from one host machine to another.

For example in my day job as an IT consultant I am required to develop code in multiple computer configurations. I am able to use my laptop and Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 (which is a free product) to create development environments which differ from my laptop. For example my laptop is running Windows 7 64 bit and using Visual Studio 2010 for development, but there may be a case where I need a Windows XP environment with Virtual Basic 6 as my development platform. I would create a virtual machine to house this environment thereby leaving my laptop intact for the specific work I need it to do.

This is a brief explanation of virtual machines and not the goal of this article but I wanted to get the explanation out for people that are not used to working within them.