Given its many turnkey virtues — e.g., the ability to rapidly deploy new OS or application instances, or to provision additional OS or application resources to address demand requirements — it’s tempting to think of virtualization as a turnkey proposition: You buy a hypervisor, you install it on your hardware, and voila! You’ve virtualized your infrastructure. Not quite. Virtualization is both a software and a hardware play, but — chiefly because software hypervisors from VMware, Citrix or even Microsoft seem to garner the lion’s share of attention — you almost wouldn’t know it. Nonetheless, experts say, the successful realization of an infrastructure in which all (or almost all) IT assets get treated as virtual resources will require a big helping hand on the hardware side, too.
Virtual Systems of Tomorrow Could Take Cues from Today’s Mainframes
September 2, 2008