Virtualization

Virtual, as the word hint, is something that is not real, but gives feeling of being real. In computer world, my first interaction with virtual machine was at the very beginning in school days, when we were made to work on dumb terminals, which had only monitor and keyboard. The terminal used to be attached to a central powerful machine which would provide processing power and memory requirements.

That is a very crude example of virtualization. With hardware cost going down in last few years, the need of dumb terminals has evaporated. But with cloud computing coming into picture, virtualization in IT industry has reached to new scales. With cloud computing it is convenient and important to manage virtual machines based on requirement or load on the application.

Virtualization goes beyond a virtual machine (hardware virtualization, software virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization are key), but for sake of this posts simplicity, I will stick to virtual machines. A virtual machine is simply a machine which does not exist in real, but can be used as a real machine. The advantage of this type of arrangement is maximum usage of hardware and hence cost efficiency.

Hypervisor is the key software component which helps running multiple operating systems (and hence machines) on one system. Read here on hypervisors.

Suggested reads

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/virtualization-software-revives-dumb-terminals-cuts-it-costs/9808
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/V/virtualization.html