Virtualization

In computing, virtualization means to create a virtual version of a device or resource,  such as a server, storage device or network.

Major applications of the concept of virtualization are:

Server Consolidation/ Hardware/Platform Virtualization:

• At times servers sit idleas the workload is only on some of the servers on the network. This results in a waste of expensive hardware resources.
• Server virtualizationattempts to increase resource utilization by partitioning physical servers into several multiple virtual servers, each running its own operating system and applications.
• The operating system running on the machine will appear to have its own processor, memory and other components.
• Server virtualization makes each virtual server look and act like  a  physical server. This is also known as “Physical-to-Virtual” or 'P2V' transformation.
• The software that creates a virtual machine is called a hypervisor or Virtual Machine Manager.

Disaster Recovery: Virtual machines can be used as backup machines for physical servers. These Virtual machine can take over workload for a server experiencing an outage.

Testing and Training: Virtualization can create virtual server to isolate machine for testing and training.

Portable Applications: Portable applications can run from a removable drive, without installing it on the system's main disk drive.

Portable Workspaces: Virtualization can create portable workspaces on removable devices.

Some common types of virtualization are:

Hardware Virtualization