VM is not just a sandbox in native environment. It's even more complicated and powerful. VM creates a "fake" or virtual bare metal "physical" computer within the Host operating system on top of hypervisors. Once in the VM, you're practically using it like a regular physical computer that's on your desk (to a certain extent), and the Guest OS and Host OS can be as similar or different as you want, as long as the Host computer's hardware and software supports it. You can even run a Guest VM OS within another Guest VM OS on the same Host. A box, within a box within another box. Inception-style.