

Ask HN: What is the big deal with Virtualization? - paraschopra

I have been hearing this term a lot in the news, mags and blogs lately. While I understand what virtualization is and I myself use Vmware occasionally, I cannot seem to understand why everyone is excited about the technology.<p>Why do you think virtualization is important in the present and coming times?
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giardini
Virtualization is sometimes considered important because it _may_ provide OS
features that certain operating systems have failed to provide in the past,
e.g., separation of code/data areas, efficient utilization of resources,
security, etc.

And you _can_ run multiple OSs on one physical machine.

See [http://www.virtual-strategy.com/Features/Why-
Virtualization-...](http://www.virtual-strategy.com/Features/Why-
Virtualization-Matters.html)

and use Google for more.

Honestly I would be happy to find an OS/hardware combination that did
everything they _should_ do (short of an IBM mainframe). As it is,
virtualization is a meta-OS layer that is just waiting to be hacked/cracked.

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lec
Virtualization has come to mean the running of a virtual machine in a physical
one and on that virtual machine running your OS of choice. However
vietualization should be thought of a much more than that. Think of storage
virtualization for instance. Here we have the opportunity of creating an
unending variety of storage options (Stripping, Mirroring, migration,
automatic backups, etc) that can happen transparently. Imagine Never having to
worry about your data stability because of virtual storage. How about virtual
device access? Nothing says that USBs could not be front ended and
encapsulated by an virtualization application that can then broker that
information to and external host ( even a virtual one). The field is very
wide, to me the promise is in creating an abstract device with transparent
access to a myriad of services (both virtual an physical).

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gaius
I am a cynic (who has completed a few P2V projects) and I would say that many
if not most people don't understand that virtualization is just _one possible
technique_ for consolidation. Consolidation matters because what is
constraining datacentres right now is power, cooling and floor loading.
Computational power per kilowatt and per square foot are the new metrics that
matter (you assume that everything is 42U tall and work in 2 dimensions).
Serious datacentre operators have long been happy to pay a premium for
density.

