Hypervisor

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If you're a Windows user of a certain vintage, you've probably encountered "DLL hell": two applications on your system require different versions of some library, and so one cannot live while the other survives. A hypervisor allows you to treat a single physical machine as if it were several virtual machines (VMs), each unaware of the others' existence.

This is basically just cribbed from Wikipedia.

While they still compete for hardware resources, their software should be perfectly isolated from each other, so configuration mismatches are impossible. The hypervisor presents each VM with the illusion that it is in full control of a smaller machine, and translates the VMs' commands to their virtual hardware into commands to the actual physical hardware.

Once you have a Hypervisor you can install various Operating Systems on it.