Virtualization - Meaning

Aside from technical explanations, we can explain the concept of virtualization for corporate governance as the efficiency of resource use and the increased availability of mission-critical applications.

Cost savings result from

• higher availability of business applications
• reduced hardware needs
• continuous business productivity through improved disaster recovery and migration opportunities
• better management of desktop applications, to avoid compatibility conflicts
• Reduced operating and administration costs

Virtualisierung - History

Virtualization has been used for over three decades ago, to partition expensive mainframe computers effectively but due to market changes and wider availability of cheap servers and desktop computers in the 1990s virtually abandoned.

This market growth on the other hand, led to new IT infrastructure challenges to optimize the availability and maintenance of client-server applications. Rising energy prices and even more, tremendous performance increases of todays "standard" PCs and servers makes the use of virtualization technology already interesting for small IT environments.

Virtualization - Operation and Products