Virtualization is an abstraction layer that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility. Virtualization allows multiple virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating systems (e.g., Windows 2003 Server and Linux) and applications to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine.

A virtual machine is the representation of a physical machine by software. It has its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, hard disks, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. The operating system sees a consistent, normalized set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components. VMware virtual machines contain advanced hardware features such as 64-bit computing and virtual symmetric multiprocessing.

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