theartofservice

Today’s IT solutions are becoming more imaginative than ever before. But who can really complain? Better allocation of space, performance, and cost savings, the groundwork is being laid for the next generation of applications and systems to appear on the horizon, if they don’t already exist.

Virtualization is probably the most imaginative solution found in IT circles these days. The basis for virtualization is the creation of an abstract layer on top of the physical layer of the computing platform that looks and acts just like the physical layer of computers, applications, and the like. The difference is that the abstract layer can handle 10 times the amount of processing, data storage, transferring and other computing tasks than what can be handled by a purely physical solution. You can’t get rid of the physical layer, but virtualization expands what the physical layer can do on its own.

At the heart of this abstract layer is a small amount of privileged code called hypervisors. Not all virtual machines utilize a hypervisor design, such as desktop VMs and Microsoft’s virtual server offerings, but some of the more prominent virtualization tools do: Vmware ESX, Intel Vpro, Virtual Iron and XenEnterprise.

Not only do these hypervisors provide the foundation for this abstract layer, they provide the initial point of security too. For this reason, some things should be known about hypervisors that can be found in part 2