Virtualization virtually everywhere
Win Treese · netWorker · 2005
I'm writing this column in April. Like many people, I'm using Intuit's TurboTax to prepare my income-tax forms. But I'm using TurboTax in a somewhat unusual way: running it on a virtual machine. TurboTax normally runs on Microsoft Windows, but the computer I want to use runs Linux. To make this all work, I'm using a program called VMware that provides the illusion of an entire separate computer on which Windows can run. From the point of view of the Linux system, VMware is just another application with just another window on the screen. The Windows software sees a full computer, and it can't really tell the difference between the virtual environment and the real one.