There are many reasons why virtualization is so popular.  If you’re in IT, you’ve no doubt noticed the shift to virtual platform computing.  Virtualization is using virtual servers to consolidate the number of actual physical servers you need.  Instead of a whole rack filled with hardware to run your infrastructure, your email, scheduling, databases, various applications and portals, you can run everything on just a few physical servers.  Instead of the typical case where you have a single operating system running on the computer, you’ll have multiple systems running all at once.  Hardware resources are shared and allocated as needed.

Software based virtualization through emulation has been around for a while, and it used to be that you needed an AS/400 if you wanted a hardware based virtualization solution.