I have tinkered with VBox to run virtual *nux clients, but never did much with them. I don't even think I networked them together (because I don't know how). So I need a sort of crash course, or 101 intro to virtualization, or what have you. Basically, where can I find anything/everything a newbie would need to go from 'knows nothing' to 'knows a lot more than nothing'?

Some basic topics I have heard about/seen mentioned/read in passing that I am curious about to start are as follows, but I know there's a lot more than just this, so what else do I need to know?

1) What are some of the larger potential applications of virtualization? What can I do with it?

2) What the hell is a QEMU (queer emu?)? KVM isn't a "keyboard-mouse-monitor" switch, is it?

3) When the term "container" is used, what are you referring to? What does it mean?

4) I know I can run a virtual network off of one machine, but how beefy of a machine do I need to do this? What could I do with this?

5) I know I need to learn more about cloud things, so where would one start with that?

I know these are probably really simplistic questions, but as I said I am just starting out here and would like to know as much as possible. Also, I know I could google these things easily, but I have done that in the past and it never lands me in an "instructional article" or "guide for using [foo]" so I figured this would be the best place to start. Thanks in advance for any and all help!

Detailed documentation is availabel at the VirtualBox site below including the User Manual:

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Documentation

That looks nice. I didn't even think to look there. Now is this just a detailed doc for VB or Virtualization in general?

A web search for "linux virtualization" will turn up loads of useful links.

Should have mentioned that I tried that as well, but there's just a LOT of pages out there, so it made me feel a bit overwhelmed with it all. I could easily just pick a page and go, but I figured I'd get better results with a bit of guidance to start out. Like a nudge in the right direction kinda thing.

When I started mucking about with VirtualBox, I downloaded their manual. I only needed to consult a few sections, since I was a hobbyist playing about, and not a hosting provider.

The manual is about how to use VirtualBox, not about virtualization in general, but it's a good start.

VM, think of them as a real physical computer for almost every task.

VM's range from full software copies of real systems to almost all shared hardware with host. They were all software based (mostly) and have slowly begun to be highly integrated with the host systems.

Cloud is a gimmick. It only means some remote data or remote resource. Don't think too much about it.

Commercial and some open vm have quite a number of features that a newbie will not need. Things like moving running systems from one hardware to another and live state backups.

Qemu is a chopped copy of the original Bochs virtual machine. It has since been updated with some other parts and still tries to be fast.

Almost any system that can run windows 95 to a basic linux could run some vm. To run modern distro's you'd need to have enough resources for both the host and client. They don't easily share ram. For example if you have 2G ram, and your host need 700m then you have about 700 to 1g left to use for client. There always seems to be loss somewhere, you'll know it when the vm complains. Some versions of qemu can actually use swap but it really gets slow.
Best to have a modern processor and motherboard that supports virtualization. Best if the choice of vm also can run on that platform.

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