Virtualization

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual version of something, such as an operating, a server, a storage device or network resources. Virtualization can be viewed as part of an overall trend in enterprise IT that includes autonomic computing, a scenario in which the IT environment will be able to manage itself based on perceived activity, and utility computing, in which computer processing power is seen as a utility that clients can pay for only as needed..... The usual goal of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and workloads. There are three areas of IT where virtualization is making head roads, network virtualization, storage virtualization and server virtualization:

• Network virtualization is a method of combining the available resources in a network by splitting up the available bandwidth into channels, each of which is independent from the others, and each of which can be assigned to a particular server or device in real time.
• Storage virtualization is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console.
• Server virtualization is the masking of server resources from server users. The intention is to spare the user from having to understand and manage complicated details of server resources while increasing resource sharing and utilization and maintaining the capacity to expand later.