Search

The Virtues Of Virtualization

Thursday, 21 December 2006 by Michel Roth

VirtualStrategyMagazine has published an article written by Walter Scott, CEO of Acronis"If you're like most IT managers, your boss probably expects you to do more with less: expand your IT capabilities and infrastructure while doing it with reduced funds, staff and hardware. It almost sounds like a paradox, but emerging technologies such as virtualization make this possible, allowing you to you can do more with less. It is a question of knowing how to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Virtualization requires a new way of looking at technology and how it can work for you. There are four kinds of virtualization: server, software, storage and network. This article examines server virtualization and migration issues.

Virtualization is not new. In fact, you have been doing it for years without really thinking about it. Nearly every IT manager and consumer is familiar with the most basic form of virtualization: partitions on a hard disk. When you create a partition and assign it a drive letter, Windows sees that partition as a virtual hard disk. As far as Windows is concerned, it is a separate, physical device. Only the software knows that this drive is really just part of a single physical drive that goes by multiple names.

Now consider: What if that virtual hard disk had its own operating system and applications? In fact, what if you had multiple partitions and each one of them had its own operating system and applications. You could effectively run several computers with one CPU, motherboard, video card, network card and disk drive. That is the underlying logic and business case for hardware virtualization.

Read the article here.