What can virtual machine use cases tell companies about systems?

There are many ways that companies can use virtual machine use cases to learn more about how virtualization components work in a virtual architecture. Use cases can identify how the virtual machine plays a role, as well as revealing more details about resource allocation, system requirements and much more.

Experts define a use case as a description of how a component works in a system. Use cases, when written for others, are often detailing the necessary steps and requirements for doing a particular task with a system component. In the case of virtual machines, the use case could be written for specific tasks such as migration, backup activities, or specific kinds of workload handling.

The use case will reveal the steps that need to be taken in order to have the virtual machine do a certain task effectively. Some use cases will be related to the idea of high availability – for instance, where a given virtual machine (or set of virtual machines) moves from one hosted location to another in order to deploy for high availability when a system is under pressure.

Some virtual machine use cases are written for fault tolerance or again, for the process of migration or changes to the system. Virtual machine use cases may be written relative to changing applications in the system, and reveal how the virtual machine or set of virtual machines support that application's performance. As a modern example, the use cases around virtual machines are informing professionals about the logistics of using cloud systems for disaster recovery, with advances in DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) and other related ideas.

Virtual machine use cases also provide a road map for teams who are looking to implement and deploy virtual machines in specific ways. Looking at virtual machines in the context of VM vs. container setups, the use of open source environments like Kubernetes, etc. is part of assessing VM use cases for insights.

Another category of research for virtual machine use cases has to do with cybersecurity. Assessing modern VM use cases, security professionals are figuring out how to ward off specific kinds of new hacking and malware threats. For example, professionals look at built-in utilities that could be compromised, and examine various types of stateless attacks, in order to use new virtual machine setups to tighten up virtualization security. Whether these are related to extensions, executables, permissions or the creation of protections for stateless protocols, the laboratory style of these design processes shows insiders how to batten down the hatches against evolving cybersecurity threats.