Here's the really simple explanations.

Emulations is pretty much literally just mapping instructions between processors. So there may be an instruction in my custom chipset called "Add4", which adds 4 inputs. I would emulate ADD4 RAX, 0x1234, 0x2345, 0x3456 that by

ADD RAX, 0x1234; ADD RAX, 0x2345; ADD RAX, 0x3456;

It gets a bit more complicated with architecture differences like memory configurations. But that all emulation is.

When you're virtualizing, you pretty much just need to manage hardware. The hypervisor does this for you by managing which resources go to where. You could virtualize it by just running it like a program. But that's really painful and tedious, so you rely on the CPU to support it. Each chip has it's differences, but it's effectively just like a syscall. You have VMCALL and VMEXIT instructions. And then you have a handler in your vmexit table, which is exactly like a syscall table. So if(exitreason == CPUID_EXIT) cpuid_handler();

For a good book you can look up "Hardware and software support for virtualization" https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Software-Virtualization-Synt... . It's honestly the only good resource i've found on what really makes this work.

I work on virtual machines at Google. I usually suggest "Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization" [1] to new team members without a virtualization background.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Software-Virtualization-Synt...