I have mentioned virtualization in the past and have given overviews of how it can be beneficial to business. However what I noticed that when I try to explain it to customers even the ones that are pretty tech savvy are usually pretty confused as to how it works exactly, so I will try to break it down in terms that everyone should be able to understand.

So lets start off by saying this. Virtualization is a technology that lets an operating system run on top of another operating system, think of it like this, if you are using windows on your computer, that is what you are stuck with, you can’t run any Linux programs. In fact you can’t run some older windows programs either, because of the way the new Windows Operating Systems are designed. Your only option is to either have a computer for every operating system and you want to use or create a multi-boot system that would allow you to boot into a different operating system, while this is fine it is very inconvenient because you have to stop working on what you are working on to reboot your machine and boot into a new OS. What happens when you need to share information between two OSs? Well this is where having more than one computer will work, but if you use 3 or 4 OSs for different applications then this will be very tedious. This is where virtualization comes in.

With virtualization provided that the computer that you are running your virtual machines on is powerful enough in terms of processing power, hard drive space, and memory, you can run all 4 of those operating systems at the same time in addition to the main OS that you are using for your everyday use.