The Hows And Whys Of Server Virtualization

Saturday, 30 September 2006 by Michel Roth

An article on ServerWatch.com by Robb Drew on the "hows and whys of Server Virtualization": Each year brings a fresh whirl of tech buzzwords. Terms like "proactive," "360-degree view" and "information life cycle management" have all been in vogue in recent history. This year, the technology de jour is "virtualization," a topic that has more than just hype behind it and has broken through into the mainstream.

"The concept behind server virtualization is not new, however. IBM has been creating virtual machines on its mainframes since the 1960s."

"So what is it? Virtualization breaks the link between the hardware and the applications that run on it. This includes virtual storage, virtual networking, application virtualization and, the focus of this tutorial, server virtualization. It requires the installation of a software layer that allows more than one server to operate on the same piece of hardware. There are two basic approaches to this...."

Read the entire article here.