Virtualization is a technique that allows sharing of physical resources among multiple customers and organizations. It does this by assigning logical names to physical storage and providing pointers to the physical resources on demand. Virtualization plays a fundamental role in cloud computing by efficiently delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions. It allows sharing of a single physical instance of a resource like a server, storage, or application among multiple users. This helps reduce costs for cloud providers through server consolidation and more efficient use of hardware resources. Some benefits of virtualization in cloud computing include better hardware utilization, increased availability of resources, easier disaster recovery, and energy savings.