Bernard Golden wrote:Virtualization is the latest in a long line of technical innovations designed to increase the level of system abstraction and enable IT users to harness ever-increasing levels of computer performance.

At its simplest level, virtualization allows you, virtually and cost-effectively, to have two or more computers, running two or more completely different environments, on one piece of hardware. For example, with virtualization, you can have both a Linux machine and a Windows machine on one system. Alternatively, you could host a Windows 95 desktop and a Windows XP desktop on one workstation.

In slightly more technical terms, virtualization essentially decouples users and applications from the specific hardware characteristics of the systems they use to perform computational tasks. This technology promises to usher in an entirely new wave of hardware and software innovation. For example, and among other benefits, virtualization is designed to simplify system upgrades (and in some cases may eliminate the need for such upgrades), by allowing users to capture the state of a virtual machine (VM), and then transport that state in its entirety from an old to a new host system.

Virtualization is also designed to enable a generation of more energy-efficient computing. Processor, memory, and storage resources that today must be delivered in fixed amounts determined by real hardware system configurations will be delivered with finer granularity via dynamically tuned VMs.