Virtualization

I have been involved in the setup of one of the servers and was doing some research on Virtualization. Virtualization is the process of abstracting hardware details from the software that runs on top of it. VMWare is one of the popular software used for virtualization, IBM too has software that does the same thing. Two operating systems could be made to run on top of a virtual layer created by VMWare running on the server, which would make the OS believe that there are two servers available.

One of the common uses of hardware virtualization are for sharing a server between two environments. I am not sure if it helps in reducing product licenses.