After working with PCs and Servers for many years we finally get something that it’s really a game changer, something that really changes the way we work with our hardware / software infrastructure.

Whether we are talking about our regular PC or a enterprise server we used to think that our software was bound or tied to a specific piece of hardware – once everything was configured and up and running we just crossed our fingers and hope that nothing wrong happened to them; even if we had a constant way of backing up our stuff.

What about upgrades, especially those involving the main Operating System? Nightmares for the IT engineers if something wrong happened along the way.

In that way things have improved a lot: we have a lot of ways of backing up and upgrading our systems, just to name a few, but we were always bound to that physical hardware – well not anymore, virtualization is here.

In essence, virtualization allows us to run several Operating Systems on a single server. How many? That depends on how much performance is needed by each operating system and if the server itself is able to handle all them at the same time. Try to picture this: dozens of servers racked on a server room now become 3 servers instead? It’s a nicer view if you asked me – and surely a more energy efficient one.

People are afraid of the performance of this Virtual Machines compared to their ‘real’ counterparts and certainly it’s a valid concern. Its not the first time that we are able to run Virtual Machines so in some cases, people have seen those running in the past and not being impress by their performance. That’s probably the case of when people used Emulation software to run other Operating Systems. Emulation needs a lot of code between the host operating system and the guest operating system. That code took CPU, Memory, resources and so on. Today’s virtualization technologies are not emulators, our virtual machines runs without emulation software – they talk to the hardware directly.

Are you using Mac? Are you able to run Windows on it? Then you’re probably running virtualization software from Vmware or Parallels.

Are you using Windows 7? You’re probably able to run old XP applications using XP Mode which is form of virtualization provided by Microsoft.

I’m going to be talking about virtualization on my next posts, but for the time being keep an eye open for every time you see the word Virtualization; because that’s going to be an integral part of every organization in the future.

Here’s some links so you can get started

Vmware (one of the leaders in virtualization)

http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/what-is-virtualization.html

Microsoft Hyper-V (Microsoft virtualization implementation)

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

Parallels Desktop for Mac or PC (consumer level solutions for running virtualization)

http://www.parallels.com/

Please check those links out! Some of the products from these vendors are free to use (like Vmware Server); there is no excuse for not trying them out.

Author: Daniel Ruiz

Posted at Geeknick

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