Virtualization - What the Heck Is It?

"Trimming the fat" is no longer a term merely heard in the fitness arena. Today the concept of "Lean" or "Going Green" is being embraced across various industries...especially IT.

IT leaders all over are being challenged or rather mandated to trim the excess fat within their technology infrastructures. Executives are demanding that we figure out ways to cut costs and improve efficiencies...essentially figure out ways to do more with less without compromising performance, availability, or end user experiences...to name a few.

Most organizations are solving these issues by turning to technologies such as virtualization. This born again technology lived a short life in the early 90's acting as a way to re-create an end user environment on a single piece of mainframe hardware. However, with the advent of inexpensive technologies and other new developments, virtualization quickly faded.

The new mandate to do more with less...especially within data centers, has quickly put virtualization back on the map. As a Project Manager specializing in infrastructure optimization, I felt compelled to quickly understand the mystery behind virtualization so that I could demonstrate the benefits of it to executive leadership. I decided to unravel this mystery with a simple premise in mind, figure out what the heck virtualization meant!

• Was it a way for me to notify my network of friends about what I was doing virtually every second of my life without being with them?
  
• Did we really figure out a technology that could transport me to the moon and back at virtually no cost?
  
• Or was the concept of Virtualization so elite, that even my most intelligent spell check tools couldn't recognize the word?

All jokes aside, what I found was (and CIO.com says it best), virtualization is essentially "a technology designed to provide a layer of abstraction between computer hardware systems and the softwares running on them." There are actually various virtualization types and I've listed a few of the more common ones below:

1. Server Virtualization* - is the partitioning of a physical server into smaller virtual servers. In server virtualization the resources of the server itself are hidden, or masked, from users, and software is used to divide the physical server into multiple virtual environments, called virtual or private servers
2. Network Virtualization* - is using network resources through a logical segmentation of a single physical network
   
3. Application Virtualization* - Application virtualization is layered on top of other virtualization technologies to allow computing resources to be distributed dynamically in real time. In standard computing, applications install their settings onto the host operating system, hard-coding the entire system to fit that application's needs. With application virtualization, each application brings down its own set of configurations on-demand, and executes in a way so that it sees only its own settings. This leaves the host operating system and existing settings unaltered
4. Storage Virtualization* - this is a collection of multiple storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device. It's often used in SAN (Storage Area Network), and makes tasks such as archiving, back-up, and recovery easier and faster

Because of it's ability to quickly show tangible results, Server virtualization is probably the most popular type of virtualization technology in the marketplace. I also learned that Desktop virtualization is becoming the next big thing...if done right.

Once I understood the concept of virtualization and some common types, I quickly found myself asking more deep rooted questions. What are the benefits of virtualization? Why would an organization need it? What are the challenges of implementing a virtualized solution? The list was endless.

Fellow PMs and technology geek wanna-be's, this is important stuff! Understanding where the future of technology is heading is the only way to intelligently assist IT leaders in making smart, more informed decisions. Over the next series of posts, I hope to "Unravel the Mystery of Virtualization" and provide you with virtualization information that you can make part of your technology tool kit. ...Until next time

*Source:www.webopedia.com