US Patent 7426565 Virtual computing environment

A computing system includes a physical server having a single instance of an operating system; and a plurality of virtual environments running on the physical server and directly supported by the single instance of the operating system. Each virtual environment responds to requests from users and appears to the users as a stand-alone server having its own instance of the operating system. Each virtual environment has a plurality of objects associated with it and supported by the operating system. Some of the objects are private and other objects are shared between multiple virtual environments. One virtual environment cannot access private objects of another virtual environment.