With a VM system, you have two primary areas that store information about the active applications and the data it USES — the physical random access memory (RAM) and space allocated on hard drives.

In stand-alone (non-networked) application environment, computer performance is largely determined by three components of the computer: CPU, the random access memory (RAM) and computer monitors.

Paging space, or swap space, is a type of logical volume that serves as a staging area for processes that are not using active random-access memory (RAM).