Pane Relief: Virtual Operating Systems
On the face of it, the idea of running multiple copies of Windows on a single machine sounds like it has, at best, limited utility. After all, Windows Server is a multiuser, multitasking operating system, and even the Windows desktop operating systems, XP and XP Professional, multitask nicely. Why add the overhead of a virtual operating system?
As it happens, there are several excellent reasons to do so. One reason is separation. While virtual operating systems can’t absolutely, positively, and completely separate the client OS from the underlying hardware or other operating systems running on the same machine, most of them can come extremely close. In a virtual operating system, the client operating systems don’t have direct access to any of the hardware, although they think they do. That means that the system as a whole can be protected from any problems, intentional or not, generated by what’s running on the client OS. This feature is especially important to developers and others who routinely run less-than-stable stuff on their computers. It’s a lot easier to recover from a virtual machine crash than a real crash.
