Contact
Virtualization
What is virtualization?
Virtualization is a technique that makes it possible to execute one or several virtual machines on a single physical machine. A set of hardware resources (processor, memory, storage, I/O devices) is assigned to each virtual machine, independently from everything else, and each machine executes its own copy of the operating system (Linux, Solaris, *BSD, Windows). The virtualization software plans the execution of the virtual machines and manages shared access to available hardware resources. The entire environment belonging to a virtual machine can be encapsulated in a single file or in a disk volume in a storage network.
Server with virtualization
In addition to server virtualization, there are other virtualization models:
- Virtualization in network
- Virtualization of main storage
- Virtualization of secondary storage
Virtualization is not a fashion, it has been available in IT departments since the 1960s, with IBM’s mainframes and VM operating system. However, it is now a booming industry due to the strong decline in the total cost of ownership (TCO) which can be attributed to technologies such as Intel’s VT and the Open Source Xen software.