As Virtual Machine
Some virtual machine infrastructure can directly import and export a boot image for direct installation to "bare metal", i.e. a disk. This is the standard technique for OEMs to install identical copies of an operating system on many identical machines: The boot image is created as a virtual machine and then exported, or created on one disk and then copied via a boot image control infrastructure that also makes virtual machine copies. The VMware vCenter Converter for instance lets users "convert physical machines to virtual machines - for free" as part of that company's suite of products to make images easier to back up and manage. Equivalents exist for Xen and other VM systems.
Read more about this topic: Boot Image
Famous quotes containing the words virtual and/or machine:
“Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune—what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)
“The momentary charge at Balaklava, in obedience to a blundering command, proving what a perfect machine the soldier is, has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate; but the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, for some years, against the legions of Slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think that that will go unsung?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)