Information Technology: Virtualization

Virtualization is the technology of my choice and it comes from my discipline of Information Technology. In simple terms, virtualization is simulating a hardware platform, operating system (OS), storage device, or network resources where the framework divides the resource into one or more execution environments. Even partitioning a hard drive is considered virtualization because you take one drive and partition it to create two separate hard drives. It’s defined as “a method of decoupling an application and the resources required to run it — processor, memory, operating system, storage and network access — from the underlying hardware host.” The important takeaway is that multiple resources can be accessed from a single server, resulting in fewer servers, less energy consumption and less maintenance. Virtualization refers to technologies designed to provide a layer of abstraction between computer hardware systems and the software running on them. By providing a logical view of computing resources, rather than a physical view, virtualization solutions make it possible to do a couple of very useful things: They can allow you, essentially, to trick your operating systems into thinking that a group of servers is a single pool of computing resources. And they can allow you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single machine. There are 3 main categories of virtualization which further split into smaller sub-categories:
Storage virtualization - combines physical storage from multiple network storage devices so that they appear to be a single storage device.
Network virtualization - consolidates computing resources in a network by splitting the available bandwidth into independent channels that can be assigned to a particular server or device in real-time.
Server virtualization - hides the physical nature of server resources, including the number and identity of individual servers, processors and operating systems, from the software running on them. A

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