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GCN Home > 12/11/06 issue

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Virtualization

By Joab Jackson and William Jackson, GCN Staff

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To veteran mainframe systems administrators, virtualization is nothing new, and open-source enthusiasts have been slowly building on the technology over the past few years. This year, however, it broke into mainstream enterprise computing in a major way.

Virtualization enables one complete operating system, plus associated applications, to run within another OS. Because many applications use only a portion of a server’s resources, more applications could run on a server—and thanks to virtualization, all those applications don’t have to be all running under the same OS.

Virtualization can happen on multiple levels. Products from XenSource Inc. and VMware Inc., both of Palo Alto, Calif., can virtualize a complete operating system. Desktop virtualization, often linked to thin-client computing, comprises a complete server-hosted environment that’s accessed remotely. Companies such as Citrix Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and VMWare offer variants of this architecture. Single applications may also be virtualized, through the use of products from Altiris Inc. of Lindon, Utah, as others.

Dennis Clem, CIO of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon, deployed virtualization to consolidate a large number of servers within the Pentagon. “It solves the space problem, and it reduces the cost of buying replacement hardware,” Clem said.
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