Talking about virtualization, you could virtually be talking about anything. But in the case I will be talking about running a computer, within a computer. That is two operating systems, running on the same hardware, at the same time.

Most computers now, have so much CPU power and memory, the operating systems using them are barely taking advantage of the power of the hardware.

At any given time, you can probably look at the resources being used by your computer and see the processor sitting at below 10% and the memory not even 1 quarter used.

We can take advantage of this over supply of physical hardware by virtually running multiple computers, on the same hardware at the same time. This is where virtualization software comes in.

Why We Want to Run Virtualization

The main reason people run virtualization is because its fun. Its just so much fun for computer enthusiasts to suddenly have 2, 3 or 4 computers running at the same time under the case of a single computer.

Most people can not go out and buy an entirely new computer to test and running multiple machines.

You might be interested in another operating system like Apple OSX or a Linux distribution but cant substantiate it buy going out and buying a new computer.

Your current computer is under used so with the help of virtualization software you can run your Linux distribution in parallel or on top of your current Windows operating system.

Another good reason is, you might be us a Apple Macbook which uses the OSX operating system. You also might need to run a particular program on made for Microsoft Windows operating system like Windows 10.

Obviously you do not want to buy a whole new computer for one program, so you can load a virtualization program on your Max, install windows into and install your windows program in that virtual machine.

What Are the Requirements

A faster and more modern machine is always desired, but not essential.

I highly recommend running virtualization on a computer with at least an I5 Processor and with at least 8GB of memory. With virtualization, most is loaded into memory so the more memory you can afford or have the, the much better your virtual machine and host machine will run.

Also, the more programs you have running in the background of your host at the time of running your virtual machine will greatly effect the performance.

Virtualization Software

There are many different sorts of Virtualization software which you can use, free and paid. The main three on the market for home use are Parallels, VMWare, and Virtual Box.

My favorite is Virtual Box. Not only is it free, is simple, east to use, easy to install and light on your system.

I find Virtual Box the easiest use on any platform. It does’t come with any of the extras and integration add-on stuff the other two come with, but its so good to use I would pay for it.

Parallels is a whole different type of software all together. It is a program you install on your Apple computer and words slightly different. You need to understand a little more about cross platform operating systems, specially Apple to use this effectively. Many people have wiped their hard drives and lost all their data trying to set this up themselves.

VMWare Products work a but more like Virtual Box but have a lot more features, a little heavier on your machine, slightly more complicated and you have to pay for it.