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Needless to talk about the benifit of distributed computing whereas similar type of operation is conducted on a number of hosts in accord with some protocols for collaboration. No central server means high scalability and fault tolerant, and, of course, no way to sue the person running the central server. By making use of a large number of hosts, aggregated computing or storage improvement could be huge.

However, in enterprise network, things look a bit different. Sometimes efficient administration, management, and migration could be the more important than computing power. In effect, one big server could run multiple instances of different OSs, and they are independent with each other. System admin only needs to maintain a limited number of machines.

Such a virtualization scheme is probably in reversion direction of distributed computing, primarily targeting bussiness systems.

A note of current business in this area: Microsoft Virtual Server (acquired from Connectix), VMware's GSX/ESX servers, Virtuozzo, and Leostream's VMC are the major players in this area.

"Virtual" here can be a bit confusing as sometimes it actually refers to a cluster of real servers acting as one single server, as in Linux Virtual Server project.