There’s More to Virtualization than You Think

Virtualization is something that is not new.  It is an established set of technologies that have been steadily evolving for over 30 years. To the surprise of some, virtualization is more than virtual machine software.

What is it?

Virtualization is a way to abstract applications and their underlying components away from the hardware supporting them and present a logical view of these resources.

There are different models of virtualization technology and we have or have had products for them:

Machine Virtualization (what we normally think when we say vitrtualization)

This is where an operating system and applications are packaged together to form a virtual machine, which is then hosted on a physical server running a host operating system or Hypervisor (a thin layer of software that provides the basic Interface with the hardware).  We have Hyper-V that is will be a part of Windows Server 2008, Virtual Server 2005 R2, and Virtual PC to support this type of virtualization.

Access Virtualization

Hardware and software technology that allows nearly any device to access any application without either having to know too much about the other.  Terminal services would be a solution that can implement this type of virtualization.

Processing Virtualization

Hardware and software technology that hides physical hardware configuration from system services, operating systems or applications.  Terminal Services is an example of this type of virtualization as well.

Storage Virtualization

Hardware/software technology that hides where storage systems are and what type of device is actually supporting applications and data.

Network Virtualization

Hardware/software technology that presents a view of the network that differs from the physical view. (Technology has been doing this for years!)

Application Virtualization

Includes software technology allowing applications to run on many different operating systems and hardware platforms.  SoftGrid is software for this type of virtualization.

Remember, it's more than just machine virtualization in the grand scheme of things.