What is Virtualization?

What is Virtualization?

Virtualization is the act of creating a virtual version of something- computer hardware, storage and network.

It allows for the distribution of a machine’s capacity among multiple user environments.

Traditionally, it was easier and more reliable to run individual tasks on individual servers: a single server hosts a single operating system that runs a single task at a time. With virtualization, one can split independent tasks onto different hardware resources. Hence, hardware resources are utilized to their maximum capacities with multiple tasks .

The technology that enables virtualization is called the hypervisor- it gives multiple users simultaneous access to perform batch processing.

Most enterprises have single-vendor IT stacks that don’t allow their legacy applications to run on a different vendor’s hardware. With virtualization, companies can partition their servers and run multiple operating systems and versions. Hypervisors sit on top of an operating system (like a laptop), or be installed directly onto hardware(like a server). Companies such as VMware and Citrix have niche HyperV products that enable virtualization capabilities in organizations.