Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Defining Virtualization

Virtualization separates resources and services from the underlying physical delivery environment. With its use, you can create many virtual systems within a single physical system. A primary driver for virtualization is consolidating servers, which provides organizations with efficiency and potential cost savings.

Characteristics

Virtualization has three characteristics that make it ideal for cloud computing:

Partitioning: In virtualization, many applications and operating systems are supported in a single physical system by portioning (separating) the available resources.

Isolation: Each virtual machine is isolated from its host physical system and other virtualized machines. Because of this isolation, if one virtual instance crashes, the other virtual machines aren’t affected. In addition, data isn’t shared between one virtual container and another.

Encapsulation: A virtual machine can be represented (and even stored) as a single file, so you can identify it easily based on the services it provides. For example, the encapsulated process could be a business service. This encapsulated virtual machine could be presented to an application as a complete entity. ...