What is the difference between parallel and virtual

Question

As the title says I was under the impression that using something like Virtualbox or VMware was actually parallel but I'm told they are different. When I searched to learn more about this I am lost in a solution. Can someone explain to me the difference?

Answer 1

Virtual is something that is not quite 'real'. It is emulated and works just like the real thing.

Parallel means two things running side by side. For example, sprinters are parallel to each other on the track.

Answer 2

Parallel is more related to parallel or concurrent computing. Typical resources involve multiple cores (of the same machine) or a cluster involving a number of nodes (each consisting of multiple processors and multiple cores) or even large-scale systems running into thousands of cores. This is often linked to computationally intensive applications such as weather forecasting or large-scale simulations.

Virtual setups, using VirtualBox or Parallels or VMWare, are meant to facilitate to have a parallel installations. For example, you can install Linux on a Mac machine or Windows on a Linux Machine.If a Windows installation is done on a Linux machine using a virtualisation software, the Windows is known as guest operating system and the linux is known as the host. On a large-scale, it is possible to have a fairly powerful machine to host hundreds of virtual machines.

Finally, to merge things in a nice way, if there is a machine with 64 cores with say 128GB RAM, the virtualisation software (VMWare for instance) will utilise the parallel nature of the machine to run the virtual machines. By the same token, you can simulate a cluster using a number of VM installations :)

Does this make sense?