As of 2008, support for running OS/2 under virtualization appears to be improving in several third-party products. OS/2 has historically been more difficult to run in a virtual machine than most other legacy x86 operating systems because of its extensive reliance on the full set of features of the x86 CPU; in particular, OS/2's use of ring 2 prevented it from running in VMware.[41] Emulators such as QEMU and Bochs don't suffer from this problem and can run OS/2.[citation needed] A beta of VMWare Workstation 2.0 released in January 2000 was the first hypervisor that could run OS/2 at all. Later, the company decided to drop official OS/2 support.
VirtualPC from Microsoft (originally Connectix) has been able to run OS/2 without hardware virtualization support for many years. It also provided “additions” code which greatly improves host-guest OS interactions in OS/2. The additions are not provided with the current version of VirtualPC, but the version last included with a release may still be used with current releases. At one point, OS/2 was a supported host for VirtualPC in addition to a guest. Note that OS/2 runs only as a guest on those versions of VirtualPC that use virtualization (x86 based hosts) and not those doing full emulation (VirtualPC for Mac).
VirtualBox from Oracle Corporation (originally InnoTek, later Sun) supports OS/2 Warp 3, 4 and 4.5 as well as eComStation as guests. However, attempting to run OS/2 and eComStation can still be difficult, if not impossible to run, because of the strict requirements of VT-x/AMD-V hardware-enabled virtualization and only ACP2/MCP2 is reported to work in a reliable manner.[42]
The difficulties in efficiently running OS/2 have, at least once, created an opportunity for a new virtualization company. A large bank in Moscow needed a way to use OS/2 on newer hardware that OS/2 did not support. As virtualization software is an easy way around this, the company desired to run OS/2 under a hypervisor. Once it was determined that VMware was not a possibility, it hired a group of Russian software developers to write a host-based hypervisor that would officially support OS/2. Thus, the Parallels, Inc. company and their Parallels Workstation was born.[43]