Ask HN: What is the big deal with Virtualization?

1 pointsby paraschopravor 18 Jahren3 comments

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.

Why do you think virtualization is important in the present and coming times?

3 comments

giardinivor 18 Jahren

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-...

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.

lecvor 18 Jahren

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).

gaiusvor 18 Jahren

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.