Sorry if this question is too stupid but I can't find an answer to it.
I'm a beginner in terms of databases so I'm taking a course in Udacity. In the course, they tell us to install Vagrant and VirtualBox in order to run an ubuntu virtual machine to make the exercises of the course. The problem is that my pc is not working properly with that virtual machine running, so I decided not to virtualize and do the stuff in my "normal" programming environment (in the course we use flask, sqlite and sqlalchemy in order to create a website using a database, and in the next lesson they teach to build a web server that uses our database). Somewhere on the internet I read about virtual machines being useful to work in your computer without messing our computer's configuration up. My question is, can this happen? Or what does it mean to "mess the configuration up"? Is it possible to make an important mistake that will make me wish I had virtualized?
I don’t think so. 
VM is useful here in two ways: first, it teaches you to work with DB as with remote server, like in real world. 
Second: it prevents your main OS from junking up. It’s not a big problem now, but windows can slow down due to many applications leaving junk in registry or whatever... I think it was mostly dealt with in win7, but was on Mac by that time.
You are probably fine, just don’t use shutil.rmtree() on C:\ ;)
Can something go wrong if I choose not to virtualize even though I was told to do it?