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Virtualization, in computer science, is a virtual (or real) of something, such as hardware platform, operating system, storage device or network resources.

Photo: Ezu

Virtualization can be seen as part of the largely expansion of enterprise IT that includes autonomic computing, a scenario in which the IT environment can be managed on the basis of perceived activity, and utility computing, where you see the processing power of computers utility customers to pay only when necessary. The usual goal of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks and improve the scalability and workload.

Virtualization within IT is not a new phenomenon; in fact, it has been a way to reduce IT costs in the industry in one form or another for nearly 20 years. The main difference now is the wide range of virtualization technologies available and how these can be implemented to achieve differing business objectives.

Because virtualization can introduce flexibility to an IT estate and bring with it a wide range of benefits, IT organizations often lose focus on the benefits they are looking for and concentrate on delivering to those needs. No single item in an IT budget is going to have the procurement impact of the mainframe of yesteryear, and as such, far more work needs to be done to quantify the benefits

Virtualization can increase the capacity of the data centre, reduce hardware support costs, bring electricity bills within digestible limits and even increase performance by removing aged architecture from your estate.

Photo: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The creation and popularity of mobile devices in the market today has seen IT departments having to respond to user requests to connect everything from smart phones to tablets to their corporate environments.

It is easy for the users to use the application, but difficult to choose.

Virtualization is further divided as desktop virtualization and server virtualization.

Server virtualization is the partitioning of a physical server into smaller virtual servers. In server virtualization the resources of the server itself are hidden, or masked, from users, and software is used to divide the physical server into multiple virtual environments, called virtual or private servers.

Server virtualization has many benefits. For example, it lets each virtual server run its own operating system and each virtual server can also be autonomously, separately rebooted of one another. Server virtualization also reduces costs because less hardware is required so that alone saves business money. It also utilizes resources to the fullest so it can also save on operational costs (e.g. using a lower number of physical servers reduces hardware maintenance).

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Desktop virtualization – Many enterprise-level implementations of technology store the resultant “virtualized” desktop on a remote central server, instead of on the local storage of a remote client; thus, when users work from their local machine, all of the programs, applications, processes, and data used are kept on the server and run centrally. Desktop virtualization allows users to run operating system and execute applications from a Smartphone or a thin client which exceed the user hardware’s capability to run.