[lec]

Virtualization has come to mean the running of a virtual machine in a physical one and on that virtual machine running your OS of choice. However vietualization should be thought of a much more than that. Think of storage virtualization for instance. Here we have the opportunity of creating an unending variety of storage options (Stripping, Mirroring, migration, automatic backups, etc) that can happen transparently. Imagine Never having to worry about your data stability because of virtual storage. How about virtual device access? Nothing says that USBs could not be front ended and encapsulated by an virtualization application that can then broker that information to and external host ( even a virtual one). The field is very wide, to me the promise is in creating an abstract device with transparent access to a myriad of services (both virtual an physical).