Difference between virtual machine process and host os process?

Question

Suppose in my pc I have Ubuntu as Host OS. Now I installed a Virtual Machine say VirtualBox (hypervisor) and then deployed a centos and a redhat os inside that as guest OS.

Suppose CentOS and redhat has 2 processes running and Ubuntu is running 3 processes. So following are my questions:

1. There are how many processes that Ubuntu is having?
2. Is there any difference between GuestOS and HostOS processes?
3. If all guestos runs as a process then they will get less time as compared to other process running on host os.

Please clear my doubts here. Thank you.

Answer 1

Well let me clear your doubts,

First of all there aren't any specific number of process for an OS, its called as cores or threads, technically you can define how many cores or threads you want to use on your virtual machine and it depends on the system configuration you use.

Secondly Guest OS is what you have created in the virtual machine and host is what your laptop or pc actually run. Host OS uses the actual hardware for the working whereas the Guest OS uses the virtual hardware like number of cores and type and size of hard drive defined by the user while adding a virtual machine.

Third, as I mentioned earlier Guest and Host OS works on the configurations used by you, if you user higher amount of cores/ threads in setting your virtual machine the Guest OS will get higher speed.

Ideally the virtual machines are used to test and create some functionality of the Operating Systems without affecting the internal OS, so you can think of it as a your parents house where you can live and grow but at the end you cannot go away from the fact that their contribution is more and so you cannot go beyond their features without leaving it and making your own home.

Answer 2

Linux operating systems are multi-threaded operating system. The host OS would consider virtual box as a thread. You can define number of cores and virtual hard disk size for guest OS by using virtual box.

Since virtual box runs in separate thread and other operations of host OS runs in separate threads, there would be less effect on speed of processing. But I've observed big variances in processing speed in systems which have low memory. Each and every thread needs specific allocation of memory for its smooth operation. So systems having more than 2 GB RAM managed virtual box very well.