Virtualisation can be a hard topic to wrap your head around, with its own arcane language. If you’re one of the many for whom the word ‘hypervisor’ conjures up images of a souped-up military helmet, let’s start with a recap.

Virtualisation, in its most basic form, involves running multiple independent operating systems on a single physical server. This is possible because physical servers typically use only a fraction of the physical resources on offer, like processing capacity, memory and storage. The rest goes to waste.