Understanding virtualization

IT organizations, especially larger ones, need to maximize their computing resources' flexibility, utilization, and scalability. These goals are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without virtualization. Virtualization is an approach taken by IT organizations to simplify their operations and respond faster to changing business demands.

Virtualization offers a practical approach to distribute an application across any number of computing devices. For example, in many cases, one computing device is not sufficient to run a business application due to the high demand loads. In a related example, application demand loads can vary over time across the organization's applications. Virtualization offers an approach to reapportion loads across servers as demands vary, enabling high availability for demand-critical applications while also streamlining the process to deploy and migrate applications.

Additionally, modern data centers employ servers...