While contemplating about the importance of virtualization in achieving green computing standards especially in organizations hosting data centers, I came across an interesting article here on how energy emissions from data centers can be used to warm homes in Scandinavian countries.
Continue reading "Embrace Parallelism with Virtual Machines" »
When I first heard about Server Virtualization, my first thought was, “Why did nobody think about this earlier”. Of course, I later learnt that the idea had been around for more than 4 decades. But then, why did it go into hibernation?
IBM introduced the concept of virtualization at a time when computers didn’t mean anything other than mainframes. It was much later that x86 and the PC revolutionized the world. So while the computer became smaller, cheaper, faster and more accessible, the very need for Virtualization disappeared. After all, why have Virtual machines when you can have ‘real’ ones?
But the exponential growth in computing capabilities (hardware processing power) has today resulted in heavily underutilized machines. Couple this with the concerns over rising carbon emissions (power consumption and cooling needs) and the increasing complexity in managing numerous servers in the data center; …and the stage was set for Virtualized machines to make a comeback.
There was but one small problem.
Continue reading "Server Virtualization: Beyond Hypervisors." »
Is it just me, or is there a direct correlation between a technology’s position on the hype curve at any given point of time and the prevalent confusion around the terms that abound describing it? Virtualization, as IBM defined it in the 1960’s, seemed rather simple, but today it can mean a lot of things.
To someone who’s relatively new to the world of virtualization; some of the terms that have come to describe the various approaches to server virtualization can be pretty daunting if not outright confusing.
How is ‘Hosted Virtualization’ different from ‘Bare-metal Virtualization’? What then is ‘Paravirtualization’? What is a hypervisor? Is ‘Hardware Emulation’ some kind of virtualization technique? And which of these (if at all) can be considered as ‘Full Virtualization’?
Wait! Did I hear you say ‘hardware-assisted virtualization’ and ‘OS-assisted virtualization’?
So, are there really so many different approaches to server virtualization?
Continue reading "Server Virtualization: Just how many types are there?" »
The last blog on Virtualization provided what you could term a 'laundry listing' of a number of Virtualization types to reinforce the fact that -'Virtualization means a lot of different things ...'. Another growing Virtualization concept is called 'Application Virtualization' and Microsoft's Application Virtualization Solution (App-V) is an interesting advancement of this virtualization type.
It is often the case that applications are designed (unknowingly) to cause a change in the state of the machine on which they run. Installation of applications often cause existing files to be overwritten, cause changes in common locations like the Program Files directory or affect the settings in registry locations like the COM registration database for example. The net result of such an application installation is that other applications that had been running well and fine start to complain. This happens because a new application installation mingles it's state with the state of the machine thus affecting existing applications. Despite you trying to install an application in a specific folder (during the process of installation), there is usually something that the application installation ends up doing in common locations like C:\Windows\System32 etc. (driver files etc.) which changes system state by overwriting/replacing configurations or files. This might be a necessity for the application to execute as per it's design.
Continue reading "Virtualization means a lot of different things" »
