Also known as: Virtualization, Virtualisation
Virtualization is splitting one physical computer into several isolated virtual machines, each behaving like a separate computer with its own operating system.1
Overview
The piece that makes this work is the hypervisor: a software layer that creates and runs the virtual machines and divides the host’s CPU, memory, and storage between them. Each VM is walled off from its neighbors, so one tenant’s crash or workload does not spill into another’s.
Where it fits
Virtualization is the foundation under the rest of this category. A virtual private server is one such VM rented out to you, and cloud computing is the same idea run across whole data centers. Without it, every customer would need their own physical server — virtualization is what makes affordable, on-demand servers possible.
Sources
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Virtualization — Wikipedia, on virtual machines and the hypervisor model. ↩