Chapter 2 - Virtualization
Virtualization
Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources.
Most of us have experience in virtualization by partitioning a hard drive. A partition is the logical division of a hard disk drive to create, in effect, two separate hard drives.
Operating system virtualization is the use of software to allow a piece of hardware to run multiple operating system images at the same time. This started on mainframes decades ago to avoid wasting expensive processing power.
In 2005, virtualization software use became surprisingly popular with the following three areas being quickly adopted:
- Network virtualization: Combines resources in a network by splitting up the available bandwith into channels, each is independent and assigned (or reassigned) to a particular server or device in real time.
- Storage virtualization is the pooling of physical storage into a single storage device that is managed from a central console; commonly used in storage area networks (SANs).
- Server virtualization is the masking of server resources (including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems) from server users to spare the user from having to understand and manage details of server resources but increasing resource sharing and utilization and expansion.
- Other related terms are: host virtual machine (host VM), guest virtual machine (Guest VM), virtual machine (VM), paravirtualization and hypervisor.
http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/definition/virtualization
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