What's the difference between virtualization and emulation?

The distinction between virtualization and emulation is fundamentally rooted in how each technology operates regarding system architecture.

Virtualization allows multiple instances of virtual machines to run on the same physical hardware by using the same underlying architecture. In this environment, the virtual machines share resources directly with the physical hardware, which results in minimal overhead, making the process efficient and fast.

On the other hand, emulation enables running software that is designed for one type of hardware architecture on a completely different architecture. This means that the emulation layer must translate the instructions from the original architecture to a format that the host system can understand, which adds significant overhead and complexity.

This difference in how both technologies manage architecture directly influences their performance characteristics. Virtualization typically delivers better performance due to this efficiency, while emulation, by nature of translating between architectures, tends to be slower and more resource-intensive.

Thus, the statement about virtualization running on the same architecture while emulation allows different architectures accurately captures the key technical difference between these two concepts.