Network Infrastructure

The following figure provides a rough overview of the network structure of a virtual machine running on a local computer or server. The hosting application (for example, VMWare Player or Virtual Box Manager) provides a virtualization platform to run cloud images or instances on your local machine. These images or instances can be provided as ready-to-use appliances or you can create your own images. These images are containers for a complete independent operating system also incorporating the application you want to run on that operating system. The hosting application provides access to physical resources of your host like network interfaces, memory and hard drive capacity. Access to the containers is possible using specially configured network interfaces and the hosting application itself, which is illustrated in the following figure.

Local cloud infrastructur