In the November 2006 edition of MacTech, Mary Norbury introduced us to the Macintosh virtualization product' Parallels. For many Mac users this was their first exposure to virtualization. Virtualization shouldn't be confused with emulation, which is the complete interpretation of an environment - including the processor. An example of this is VirtualPC running on PowerPC (never mind the name; VPC for PPC is an emulator, not a virtualizer). Virtualization doesn't emulate a processor, but allows multiple instances of an OS, or multiple OSes, to have access to the same processor or pool of processors while isolating the environments that the OSes are running in. This is a very simplified view of what virtualization and emulation do, and most products do some amount of both. The discussion of emulation versus virtualization could fill this magazine and then some, so we are going to concentrate on the latest virtualization product to hit the Macintosh world, VMware's Fusion.
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