Steve Jones - SSC Editor (1/17/2012)
How did you explain virtualization to him? I ran into someone, a dev, a couple years ago and it was was a struggle to get him to understand the idea of a VM. For some reason, he was lost, and I had a hard time giving him a good analogy.
My explanation is as follows:
You can run applications under an operating system. That's what people are doing every day.
As operating system is also an application, of a special kind since it has lots of privileges, if you solve relationships between privileges (which is called "protection levels"), you can run operating system and the apps it runs as an app under another operating system.
That is, since the early 70s, called virtual machine.
It is an old hat even for Microsoft: I ran multiple copies of PC-DOS under OS/2 in 1992.