Part 1: Overall Virtualization Concepts

Okay, so if you already understand what emulation, virtualization and VirtualBox is, then you can skip this whole intro. But if you’re a novice who wants to take advantage of the power of virtualization for web development—and engaging in the painful task of Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser cross-platform compatibility testing—then please read on.

What’s emulation versus virtualization?

Simply put, emulation is a software method where one combination of hardware and software to behave like another completely combination of hardware and software.

So if you want to play vintage Atari 2600 video games on a modern computer, you would use emulation software that would emulate the Atari 2600 hardware on your modern system.

But emulation and virtualization is not 100% the same.

Virtualization—in contrast to emulation—is a software method which allows you to better divide and allocate existing, non-emulated system resources for other purposes.

So in the case of a modern PC—like Apple’s Macintosh computers—which use the same Intel-based x86 CPUs like Windows machines, virtualization allows an Apple Macintosh x86-based hardware running macOS to run Microsoft Windows—which requires x86-based hardware as well—within a virtual environment on the same machine. This is great!

Why is virtualization so great for web development?

You know why this is great? Because, I like to work on primarily in macOS and regularly need do web browser cross-platform compatibility of my work with Internet Explorer running on Windows.

In the past, I literally had another completely separate Windows PC I would use exclusively to do web browser cross-platform compatibility tests with Internet Explorer. That setup worked, but it’s clunky to say the least. A whole separate machine? One I had to maintain as well? Nope. Not a good setup.

But now thanks to virtualization, I can have Windows in a guest machine running on my desktop via VirtualBox right next to my development environment on the host machine running MAMP. This is simply great since it streamlines the whole development process.

What is a host machine versus a guest machine?

If it’s unclear to you what a host machine is compared to a guest machine: A host machine is the computer running the VirtualBox application itself and a guest machine is a virtual machine that runs within the VirtualBox application itself.

So in this case, the host machine is my Macintosh running macOS and the guest machine is a version of Windows running via VirtualBox.