This is in continuation of my first post on Cloud Computing which is listed here. This post is about 'Virtualisation'. Virtualisation is essentially a software technology that allows you to maximise the use of your computer hardware. Its built on the knowledge that most computing power is underutilised because the underlying hardware is designed to run only one operating system and one application.
How does it work: Virtualisation use a thin software layer that de-couples the underlying hardware from the operating systems, applications and data. This layer then manages the allocation of hardware resources to applications and data. For more on the intricacies, check this link.
Using Virtualisation, from a personal desktop perspective you can run Windows on a Mac or both Windows and Linux on a PC. From a business perspective, think of an organisation which has its own servers. In most cases, these existing servers are underutilised and its likely new servers are procured when new applications are implemented. Virtualisation allows you to create multiple virtual machines within a single machine allowing you to run multiple operating systems and applications simultaneously. This concept has now been extended to the mobile phone market as well and you can read more about that here.
If we link Cloud computing and this concept, it becomes clear that virtualisation is the technology makes cloud computing possible. Virtualisation allows vendors like Amazon to make available cloud computing and also helps individual organisations re-deploy their existing hardware and essentially, build an 'internal cloud'.
The term virtualisation has almost become synonymous with the market leader VMWare. They are an EMC company and boast 100 % of the Fortune 100 as clients. For more information on virtualisation, check out http://www.vmware.com/virtualization
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