Virtualization

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In computing, virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources:

  • Resource virtualization, the virtualization of specific system resources, such as storage volumes, name spaces, and network resources
    • Encapsulation, the hiding of resource complexity by the creation of a simplified interface
    • Virtual memory, which allows uniform, contiguous addressing of physically separate and non-contiguous memory and disk areas
    • Storage virtualization, the process of completely abstracting logical storage from physical storage
      • RAID - redundant array of independent disks
      • Disk partitioning, is the splitting of a single resource (usually large), such as disk space or network bandwidth, into a number of smaller, more easily utilized resources of the same type
      • Logical volume management, which combines many disks into one large pool and then divides it into logical disks.
    • Network virtualization, creation of a virtualized network addressing space within or across network subnets
    • Channel bonding, the use multiple links combined to work as though they offered a single, higher-bandwidth link
    • I/O virtualization e.g. vNICs, vHBAs
    • Memory virtualization Aggregates RAM resources from networked systems into virtualized memory pool
  • Computer clusters and grid computing, the combination of multiple discrete computers into larger metacomputers

Virtualization can also refer to:

Physicalization is the converse approach to virtualized data centers, where, instead of allocating workloads across subdivided, single machine, virtualized resources, the hardware is organized as replicated sets of simple atomic compute resources that are not virtualized. External control software dispatches workloads to these individual atomic compute nodes in much the same way as a VMM manages workload placement in a virtualized system.

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