Virtual PCVirtual PC is an x86 emulator for PowerPC Mac hosts and a virtualization app for Microsoft Windows hosts. It was created by Connectix in 1997 and acquired by Microsoft in 2003. The Mac version was discontinued in 2006 following the Mac transition to Intel, while the Windows version was discontinued in 2011 in favour of Hyper-V. Until version 4, Virtual PC only supported Classic Mac OS hosts. Version 4 was released in 2000 for both Mac OS and Windows, and version 5 (2001) added support for Mac OS X hosts.
Full virtualizationIn computer science, full virtualization (fv) employs techniques used to create instances of an environment, as opposed to simulation, which models the environment; or emulation, which replicates the target environment such as certain kinds of virtual machine environments. Full virtualization requires that every salient feature of the hardware be reflected into one of several virtual machines – including the full instruction set, input/output operations, interrupts, memory access, and whatever other elements are used by the software that runs on the bare machine, and that is intended to run in a virtual machine.
OS-level virtualizationOS-level virtualization is an operating system (OS) paradigm in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user space instances, called containers (LXC, Solaris containers, Docker, Podman), zones (Solaris containers), virtual private servers (OpenVZ), partitions, virtual environments (VEs), virtual kernels (DragonFly BSD), or jails (FreeBSD jail or chroot jail). Such instances may look like real computers from the point of view of programs running in them.
Hyper-VMicrosoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization component of the client editions of Windows NT. A server computer running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individual virtual machines to one or more networks.
Microsoft Virtual ServerMicrosoft Virtual Server was a virtualization solution that facilitated the creation of virtual machines on the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 operating systems. Originally developed by Connectix, it was acquired by Microsoft prior to release. Virtual PC is Microsoft's related desktop virtualization software package. Virtual machines are created and managed through a Web-based interface that relies on Internet Information Services (IIS) or through a Windows client application tool called VMRCplus.
QEMUQEMU (Quick Emulator) is a free and open-source emulator. It emulates a computer's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can interoperate with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another.
VMwareVMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS. VMware ESXi, its enterprise software hypervisor, is an operating system that runs on server hardware. In May 2022, Broadcom Inc. announced an agreement to acquire VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at $61 billion.
X86 virtualizationx86 virtualization is the use of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities on an x86/x86-64 CPU. In the late 1990s x86 virtualization was achieved by complex software techniques, necessary to compensate for the processor's lack of hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities while attaining reasonable performance. In 2005 and 2006, both Intel (VT-x) and AMD (AMD-V) introduced limited hardware virtualization support that allowed simpler virtualization software but offered very few speed benefits.
