Virtualization

“Virtualization” has become a very used and common word today and not only in clouds.

We have virtual machines on our laptops, many (maybe all) IT departments in Universities install and make available virtual machines instead of real servers.

There are many reasons why the virtualization concept took so much space.

Probably the main one is that gives us the illusion of having much more resources.

Another one is that it breaks the limits of the hardware (if we need a new server, we install a virtual machine and skip all the pain of buying a new physical machine - IaaS) and software (if we need a new application that runs on a specific OS, we just install a vm with that OS and that application running on it - PaaS) and many others like testing a new application or a new OS. If something goes wrong we just erase the vm or because of the easy relocation, virtual machines can be used in disaster recovery scenarios.

There is a huge discussion going on around the duo “Performance and Virtualization” and on whether it is possible to have good performance in a virtualized environment.

– Alessandra Scicchitano - 2013-01-16