Virtualization technology has been around for more than 40 years but it wasn’t until recently that it really took off in the enterprise thanks to its promise of hardware savings and increased agility.
By encapsulating and isolating operating systems and applications from the underlying hardware, virtualization lets IT departments pack multiple independent virtual machines, each with its own operating system and applications, on a single server. This has brought real business benefits to organizations in terms of administrative and cost efficiencies. In addition freely available virtualization software, such as VM Player, has highlighted the potential of virtualization and has led to a boom in the use of virtualized software on the desktop.
https://secure.sophos.com/sophos/docs/eng/papers/sophos-virtualization-w...
