The present invention provides a virtual machine creation method and apparatus. The method includes: acquiring a first installation package of a first application; determining essential environmental data corresponding to the first installation package, obtaining a simplified operating system via compilation according to the essential environmental data, and packaging the simplified operating system and the first installation package to obtain a virtual machine installation package; and running the virtual machine installation package to create a virtual machine. The present application provides a method for automatically creating a virtual machine for independently running an application, and only a simplified operating system needed by the applications on the virtual machine is only configured for the virtual machine, instead of configuring an entire operating system environment. This greatly saves terminal resources.