Making a Good Case for Virtualization Technologies

bob weinstein - April 13, 2009 Virtualization has been around since the 1960s. There are still kinks to iron out, but it has proven itself as a sustainable technology that only improves over time. Lew Smith, practice manager for virtualization at Interphase Systems, an IT consulting company in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., says that in the past, best practices dictated that organizations run one application on one physical server. “The challenge was getting maximum utilization from that one server,” says Smith. “But all they could expect was a 5 percent to15 percent utilization rate. Organizations were upset because they weren’t getting a great return on their investment.”

A little more than a decade ago, VMware took the virtualization concept and ratcheted it up several notches. “It started from the desktop and moved off into server technology,” Smith explains. “Virtualization in its current iteration--and at its most basic level--decouples the operating system from the underlying hardware. But the key to virtualization today is the insertion of a hypervisor,” a system program that provides a virtual machine environment and which sits between the hardware and the virtual machine.

The beauty underlying the virtualization concept is that the virtual machine is, in essence, data, says Smith. “All the machine configurations and applications …

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