The virtualisation technology is one of the sleekest inventions of the modern computing. This is not the technology of the future but this is the future! With the implementation of virtualisation you potentially reduce your business cost down to one from multiple expenses. Assuming you know what virtualisation technology is and you just need to know where to start and a little more about the available options.
Is emulation and Virtualisation the same?
This is where the line is drawn and quite a noticeable one. Virtualisation takes on the hardware of the host system and right away allocates some portion of the space, memory and power to the individual virtual machines.
For instance, if you have an Intel based system, a hypervisor would create a virtual machine which acts exactly like the host of the system, in this case the Intel system. For virtualisation to be a virtualisation, it can not act like any other kind of computer. For instance, a virtual machine on an Intel system can not act like a Gameboy colour. The job of the hypervisor is simply to pass the code from the virtual machine to the host system that is running on.
Idea behind emulation
Emulation on the other hand is quite different from virtualisation. Emulator is kind of software or a hardware which converts the commands from and to the host system into a completely different platform. One of the neat example of this would be the mighty games emulator out there. For instance SNES, MyBoy and the mighty RetroArch. Another instance apart from the gaming emulator is the android emulator like BlueStack and so on.
Note that all of these emulators have different requirements to run them properly. For instance, a host system trying to run PS4 Games on PC require hardware way more powerful than the actual platform being emulated. At that point you probably can buy the platform rather than upgrading your PC only for emulation purpose. Unless you really want to be thus geeky.