Most developers understand that they have a local workstation where everything is installed. Every once in a while, they need to log in to a development server to check configuration - web.config, IIS, .NET security. A virtual machine is no different from having a server somewhere that you can log in to. However, it could be either on your own workstation or on another machine.

Here's a good read[/url] on how to explain virtualization to non-techies