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.

Every computer has a processor and some random-access memory (RAM), also known as physical memory.

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.