Fall is in the air. Here at eWEEK's offices in Woburn, Mass., the leaves on the tree outside my window are starting to change colors, the air is getting crisp, and I can see ... er, kids throwing snowballs at passing cars? Oh, they're from the ice rink next door, and what they're throwing is the ice scraped up by the Zamboni. For a minute there, I thought global warming was running in reverse.

Also in the air is virtualization. Not literally, of course, but it seems like you can't get too far into the day without hearing something about the technology that is being pitched as the cure-all for everything—even the aforementioned global warming (through green IT initiatives).

But, I wondered recently, is virtualization one of those technologies that a lot of people don't really understand? I recently cut an explanation of virtualization from a story I was editing for the print version of eWEEK. My thinking was that eWEEK readers already know what it is at this stage, so there's no need to spend precious print space on a definition.

But I recently spoke with an IT manager who responded with "What's that?" when I asked about virtualization. I explained that I was referring to the technology that allowed you to carve up one system into the equivalent of many different systems, where each virtual system can host a separate application that thinks it's running on a machine all its own.

Totally clear, right?

I got perhaps a better description from eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza, who got it from eWEEK Executive Editor Michael Hickins, who got it from someone else.

Jim and I were talking about it in the wake of an interview he did for the Business Hour show on CBS Radio Chicago. With all the hoopla about the VMware IPO and the recent VMWorld conference, the producer of the show was looking for someone to explain virtualization to the layperson.

On air, Jim suggested to the program hosts and their listeners that the best metaphor for virtualization was a big cooking pot, in which lots of different meals could be prepared and each meal would think it was the only thing being cooked.

After his interview was over, Jim and I had some fun extending the metaphor: The cook (administrator) has to clean one only pot (single server as opposed to many) and would need to use only one burner on the stove (power and space savings). We could have gone even further by saying that with so many meals being cooked, it would be difficult to know if everything would end up satisfying all appetites (VM and license management requirements).

Jim told me that the hosts of the show also wondered whether VMware would ever be the Google of virtualization. It already is, Jim told them. But, Jim added, don't expect that Joe Average will know the name VMware like he does Google (or, for that matter, use the name VMware as a common verb).

An acquired taste, I guess.