Welcome to the Community - - I assume when you mention virtual player your are referring to VMware Player - VMware Player is software written by VMware that allows you to create a virtual machine. VMware Player is in a class virtualization software called hosted Hypervisors - which means they run on top of an Operating System. VMware Player can run on Windows and Linux. Other hosted Hypervisors that VMware produces are VMware Workstation which can also run on Windows and Linux and VMware Fusion which runs on OS-X. The difference between these is VMware Player is free and VMware Fusion and Workstation you have to buy. With VMware Workstation you gain more functionality.
There is also a bare metal Hypervisor which is installed directly on the bare metal - there is no need to have an Operating System already instead. ESXi is VMwares's bare metal Hypervisor. Without the underlying O/S, the bare metal Hypervisor will perform better and is typically used in the datacenter
Both bare metal Hypervisors and hosted Hypervisors creates an environment where you can run a virtual machine. This environment will allocate resources to the virtual machine as needed. This allows you to run multiple virtual machines on a single piece of hardware. A virtual machine is a set of files that includes as a minimum a configuration file, virtual nvram file and a virtual disk. The vitrual machine behaves exactly like a physical machine.
