What’s the difference between an emulator and a virtual machine?

Question

What’s the difference between an emulator and a virtual machine?

In: Technology

Answer 1

(There’s a large overlap between the two: e.g., QEMU can be seen as emulator for running virtual machines. But to put accent on differences:)

Emulator makes computer pretend to be completely different hardware, e.g. a PC may pretend to be a Super Nintendo.

Virtualization divides the existing hardware into smaller, independent but similar hardware. The resulting hardware can bes used for running different software. E. g., using VirtualBox, you can divide your Intel x86-based system into 2 smaller x86-based systems, and run Linux on one and Windows on another independently – they can not even “feel” each other.