What Is Computer Virtualization?

I’ve always had a hard time explaining computer virtualization to people (mostly clients) who had no idea what I was talking about. Now this morning an idea came to me so I needed to write it down asap, so here it goes….

Computer virtualization is like a shopping mall. Instead of having each shop in it’s own building, all of the shops are inside of the same physical building, but still completely separated. There is a hallway to get from one shop to the other, which is how they can communicate with each other and all share the same resources.

That is what computer virtualization is like. You have one physical computer box, but more than one OS has the ability to run inside of it, completely separate, yet sharing the same resources.