Oftentimes, virtual machine guests can be served up to thin clients on-the-fly, which is more commonly seen in large enterprise environments. For example, VMWare Workstation is designed for desktop environments, while VMWare ESX and ESXi are “bare metal” systems designed to run on a server that is dedicated to running virtual machine guests. There are different types of virtualization software products that can host virtual machine guests.A thin client is a minimalist computer and operating system configuration, which loads its desktop environment and/or applications from a virtual machine guest that is hosted by a remote system.A virtual machine guest is the virtual machine and operating system which is run by the virtual machine host.As an example, this could be the environment where software like VMWare Workstation is installed. A virtual machine host (also often referred to as the hypervisor) consists of the computer and operating system which runs the virtualization software.Let’s first establish operational definitions before trying to understand the impact: When licensing your applications, you must consider the impact of virtualization software on your ability to control your licensed applications with your customers.

Virtualization software is in widespread use.