Today's Most Hot Topic "Server Virtualization"

ABSTRACT

We have witnessed low resource utilization of high performance graphics workstations in our instructional computer laboratories. The low utilization statistics indicate that workstation consolidation could achieve great savings in infrastructure, networking, power consumption, and maintenance costs. In addition, we would spend less time in deployment, security, and fault isolation without compromising performance.

Server virtualization opens up a range of new possibilities for autonomic datacenter management, through the availability of new automation mechanisms that can be exploited to control and monitor tasks running within virtual machines. This facilitates more powerful and flexible autonomic controls, through management software that maintains the system in a desired state in the face of changing workload and demand.Virtualization, a well established technology in the desktop and server domain, is currently investigated and analyzed with respect to its potential within mobile devices.

"What is Server Virtualization"

Server virtualization, also known as hardware virtualization, server virtualization enables multiple operating systems (can be different) to run on a single physical machine as virtual machines (VMs). Server Virtualization enables organizations to consolidate physical servers into a single system running multiple operating systems and applications to increase system utilization. The software layer providing the virtualization is called a virtual machine monitor or hypervisor. A hypervisor can run on bare hardware or on top of an operating system.

Virtualization is an abstraction layer that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system to deliver greater IT resource utilization and flexibility. Virtualization allows multiple virtual machines with heterogeneous operating systems to run in isolation, side-by-side, on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) upon which an operating system and applications are loaded. The operating system sees a consistent, normalized set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components.

Benefits

With server virtualization, you can consolidate workloads of underutilized server machines onto a smaller number of fully utilized machines. Fewer physical machines can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure. Virtualization reduces hardware investment, tremendously enhancing server and application management tasks. It leads to better capacity planning, higher availability, smarter resource sharing, and simpler heterogeneous storage infrastructure management. Another benefit is the ability to securely separate virtual operating systems, and the ability to support legacy software as well as new OS instances on the same computer. Virtualization also has a benefit when working on operating system development: running the new system as a guest avoids the need to reboot the computer whenever a bug is encountered.

See More:

1. Server Virtualization
2. How it Works – Server Virtualization
3. Example of Server Virtualization
4. Hypervisors, Xen, VMWare, Hyper-V
5. Comparison of Hypervisors
   

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