Professional Xen® Virtualization

Chapter 1. Overview of Virtualization

Virtualization is one of the hottest topics in information technology today. The increasing speed and capabilities of today's x86 processors have made virtualization possible on commodity hardware, and virtualization provides an attractive way of making the most of that hardware.

As happens with most popular IT buzzwords in their heyday, virtualization is frequently touted as the solution to all of your IT woes. I'm sure we'd all like to find some one true technology that enables us to set up a powerful, reliable, and highly available IT infrastructure once and for all, so that we can all go home or at least throttle down our hours so that we can work 9-to-5. I have both good news and bad news. The good news is that virtualization is a cool and powerful technology that can indeed simplify your computing infrastructure and help you get the most bang for your buck out of the latest, fastest processors, networking, and storage technologies. The bad news is that, like anything in the real world, successfully implementing, deploying, and supporting a new IT infrastructure based on virtualization requires the same level of planning and system design that any basic shift in infrastructure always has. That's why we're all here and why this book was written in the first place—to define basic concepts, explain basic issues, and explore how to successfully make the most of the best of today's virtualization technologies while providing the capability and ...