You lost me.....
It takes time to setup a VM but it is easier to back up and restore.
The VMs now are pretty good and easy to configure. I use VMWare's Fusion on Mac OS 11 and VMWares Workstation Pro at work. At home I use the free player version since I just use that to make YouTube videos.
Now that I am mostly retired I work a lot with our IT person making sure our IT infrastructure is secure. We have concentrated all our old physical servers on a few powerful servers that run the old servers as VMs. We have 3 computers that can load share VMs as well a 2 NAS that provide redundancy. What is nice is that we can back up or restore individual VM with ease.
If we ever got attacked by ransom ware we can restore/replace the infected VMs easily. We may lose a day's worth of work.
In the automation world it is easy run a host system using Mac OS or Linux and run VMWare on it. Now it is possible to have a separate VM for each type of PLC but also save away VMs when a project is done so 5 years later it can be restored to do updates or required changes that project knowing it will work. I think this is a biggy.
Would you like them highlighted in a specific color that would help you "find your way"?
The search function could also be a guiding light.
No reason for that kinda attitude toward a fella just asking a question about something he doesn't understand, and being rather baffled by the detailed response.
Yes its a common enough question here and search may have brought him what he needed but not always, and the ability back and forth discuss it with knowledgeable folks is how one learns.
Would you like them highlighted in a specific color that would help you "find your way" ?
The search function could also be a guiding light.
Advantages And Disadvantages Please........
You lost me.....
Of the list of disadvantages posted above I would say that disk space is by far the biggest issue I have to deal with. I use Virtualbox and have both Windows 7 and Windows 10 guest systems. Windows 10 seem to be OK but Windows 7 balloons and takes a bit of work to get the size down where it should be; disk defrag and a few other steps.
Aren't current USB-C drives fast enough to run the VMs from it? Never tried it, don't even have a USB-C drive, but I think someone here already did it.
With a fast enough USB connection you can absolutely run it from an external drive. However, you want to have it backed up. If it is only on your USB and not on the hard drive then you have no backup. Unless of course you have it saved to yet another location. I always copy to my hard drive just so I have my USB as a backup.
OG