hardware emulation

Hardware Emulation Hardware emulation is the use of one hardware device to mimic the function of another hardware device. A hardware emulator is designed to simulate the workings of an entirely different hardware platform than the one it runs on. Hardware emulation is generally used to debug and verify a system under design. An administrator must use hardware emulation if he needs to run an unsupported operating system (OS) within a virtual machine (VM). In such a scenario, the virtual machine does not have direct access to server hardware. Instead, an emulation layer directs traffic between physical and virtual hardware.