Virtualization
Slash operating and capital expenditures with virtualization technologies.
Virtualization technology is possibly the single most important issue in IT and has started a top to bottom overhaul of the computing industry. The growing awareness of the advantages provided by virtualization technology is brought about by economic factors of scarce resources, government regulation, and more competition.
Virtualization is being used by a growing number of organizations to reduce power consumption and air conditioning needs and trim the building space and land requirements that have always been associated with server farm growth. Virtualization also provides high availability for critical applications, and streamlines application deployment and migrations. Virtualization can simplify IT operations and allow IT organizations to respond faster to changing business demands.
The socio-political ramifications of global warming requiring good corporate citizens to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, creates an added incentive for virtualization.
The availability of better virtual machine isolation through new Intel® Virtual Technology hardware support in commodity systems together with the broad availability of virtualization software provides a level of efficiency to meet these demands.
This paper discusses what virtualization is, how Intel technologies improve it, and how organizations can benefit from adopting virtualization into future IT plans.
What is Virtualization?
Virtualization is a combination of software and hardware engineering that creates Virtual Machines (VMs) - an abstraction of the computer hardware that allows a single machine to act as if it where many machines.
- Without VMs: A single OS owns all hardware resources
- With VMs: Multiple OSes, each running its own virtual machine, share hardware resources
- Virtualization enables multiple operating systems to run on the same physical platform
