What is Virtualization?
Virtualization first came on the scene in the sixties with the coining of the term “time sharing.” Around that same time, IBM Watson Research Center started a project called the M44/44X Project. The work involved testing this “time sharing” concept where virtual machines (44X) were created to image the main machine, the IBM 7044 (M44). Soon after came the virtual machine monitor (VMM) giving the ability to create multiple virtual machines, each instance capable of running its own operating system. Now, over four decades later, we are extrapolating on the fundamental technologies of virtualization, creating new, more efficient ways to manage resources and deliver services. Virtualization is the next big step in the evolution of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®. It’s easy to see why. Some estimates say servers typically operate between 15% and 25% of CPU capacity. With virtualization, that could be improved dramatically, up to 80%.
Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. While others are leaping aboard the virtualization bandwagon now, VMware is the market leader in virtualization. Our technology is production-proven, used by more than 120,000 customers, including 100% of the Fortune 100.
Virtualization refers to technologies designed to provide a layer of abstraction between computer hardware systems and the software running on them. By providing a logical view of computing resources, rather than a physical view, virtualization solutions make it possible to do a couple of very useful things: They can allow you, essentially, to trick your operating systems into thinking that a group of servers is a single pool of computing resources. And they can allow you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single machine. Virtualization has its roots in partitioning, which divides a single physical server into multiple logical servers. Once the physical server is divided, each logical server can run an operating system and applications independently. In the 1990s, virtualization was used primarily to re-create end-user environments on a single piece of mainframe hardware.
