Most of you would probably know what a virtual machine or virtual environment is, but for the sake of those who do not we’ll share some basic info on them.

Virtual machine is an operating system – some prefer to call it application environment – that is installed on software that imitates certain hardware. Thus it provides experience similar to the one a user would have using the imitated hardware.

Physical hardware that hosts multiple virtual machines is required to have a capacity to do so – we are talking about the bandwidth, storage, etc. You can move, copy and reassign virtual machines between host servers in order to equalize the resources utilization – it is done in a fairly easy way, and any system administrator or even computer user can learn how to do it.

Common problem:

Virtual machines provide us with a lot of advantages, not to mention executing entire operating systems and software applications. However they typically have one drawback – no access to serial ports of the host machine. What if you have to use a peripheral that uses a serial port to communicate with the system? Or if you have an application to debug or hardware to configure?

There is way to go about it, read below on how to access COM port in virtual machine.