Virtualization: Old Technology Offers Huge New Potential

  • Authors:
  • Greg Goth

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Distributed Systems Online
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Industry consensus holds that once deployment and management costs are factored in, the typical enterprise spends US$10,000 to $15,000per x86 server per year on a nonvirtualized computing configuration. Yet, even though IBM pioneered the technology in its System 360 and370 mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s, the economics of PC-based computing architectures since the 1980s put large-scale virtualizationon the back burner. However, as x86-based data centers grow ever larger, corporate IT managers are beginning to turn their attention backto the old idea of virtualization. Essentially, virtualization uses a virtual machine monitor or host called a hypervisor to enable multiple operating system instances to run on a single physical server. The hypervisor can run directly on a given server's hardware platform, with the guest operating system running on a layer above the hypervisor. It can also run within an operating system, with the guest OS running on the third layer above the hardware.