How Does Virtualization Work?

From a very high level virtualization architecture  is pretty straight forward.  You take one very powerful server and you install virtualization software on it.  Once you have the virtualization “layer” installed, you then install any desired server systems on top of it.  This effectively creates a platform for a one-to-many hardware-to-software relationship.  Of course, all the hardware and software specifications need to be taken into account cumulatively to properly design and deploy a virtualized environment.

What is Virtualization

The simplest way to explain virtualization may be:  the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware.  Of course, this is my personal definition and is specific to the context of how SMB’s typically use virtualization.  For a more formal definition, Wikipedia has a pretty good one.  Anyhow, in practice, this means that if your business employs 3 physical servers running Windows Server operating systems you could purchase one server and run all three instances of your Windows Server operating systems on that single piece of hardware. 

At first glance it may not seem that revolutionary, but virtualization is changing the way technology is used across all market segments. Really.

Virtualization. Simplified.

There’s no doubt that virtualization is becoming more and more prevalent for small businesses of all sizes.  There are lots of reasons for this including:

• Reduced downtime
• Increased performance
• Strong disaster recovery
• Scalability
• Excellent business flexibility

But I find it curious that many companies I meet with are initially confused by the concept.  So…here’s my attempt to simplify virtualization.

At its most basic level, virtualization for small businesses generally involves running multiple server operating systems on one physical server.  That’s it.  Oh sure, more than one physical server can be deployed to create better redundancy, less downtime, etc.  But just knowing that simple concept – multiple server systems running on a single piece of hardware (server) – puts you way ahead of many small businesses.