Switching to Microsoft® Windows 7: The Painless Way to Upgrade from Windows XP or Vista

11. Virtualization

Virtualization, simply put, is a method whereby more than one virtual computer shares the resources of a single physical system. It is a software environment that acts like a physical computer, executing programs as if it were one. A single physical computer thus can simultaneously act like one or more virtual computers. Virtualization has several benefits:

• It allows you to run more than one computer on your physical computer, as we’ll see a little later in this chapter.

• It provides a layer of protection between the system that you do your work on and the underlying computer system that manages the physical resources of your computer.

• It allows you to use a logical method of using the resources of your computer.

Virtual ...