Computers and The Internet

 by: Matt Peterson

There is a lot of buzz going around about Virtualization.

What is Virtualization, and what benefits does it provide?

In this article we will take a look at the technology to see

how it can provide a great deal of flexibility and cost

effectiveness for IT professionals and software developers.

Virtualization technology allows multiple virtual machines

to run on a single host computer. These virtual machines can

run different operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and

UNIX. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual

hardware resources (e.g., CPU, RAM, Hard Drive, etc)

allowing the operating system to run as if it were installed

on a physical machine.

The benefits of Virtualization technology are far reaching.

Many organizations have moved to the virtual machine

solution to consolidate multiple servers, running side by

side on a single physical machine. Server consolidation

allows IT professionals to fully utilize server resources,

while isolating virtual machines and allowing them to run

different operating systems and applications. Software

developers utilize virtual machine technology to quickly

test applications on different operating systems, without

the hassle of setting up multiple physical machines for

testing or taking the risk of causing problems by testing in

a production environment.

You can run Virtualization software on pretty much any

platform. Once the software is installed it is simple to

create virtual machine instances. Virtual machines are just

a set of files located on the host machine. You configure

your virtual machine settings on the host computer, install

the operating system and you are ready to go. It is a very

common practice to use a master image of a virtual machine.

This master image can be a fully configured machine, with

the operating system and all required applications

installed. You can then rapidly deploy virtual machines by

copying the master image to multiple Virtualization hosts to

provide zero downtime and 100% server availability.

There are a number of Virtualization products available.

VMWare, which is probably the most popular, recently

announced that it will be releasing a free version of its

GSX Server product. This will allow any organization to host

virtual machines on either Windows or Linux hosts. Other

Virtualization products include Microsoft’s Virtual Server and SWsoft’s Virtuozzo, just to name a few.