by Jules Lister

Created on: August 02, 2009

In the world of computing the pace of advancement is phenomenal in the power that PC's, Laptops and more relevant in the corporate world, Servers, continues to develop. Its like having a Bugatti Veyron in a country with speed restrictions, you have all this power but you can't use it. Having spent an absolute fortune and can only ever use a small percentage of the cars potential, effectively wasting it. With computers the same is true, they have become so powerful that most people will never come close to using the power that these machines have to offer.

For the home user this is a good thing as it will mean that the machine they have bought now, even though being very underused, will be future proof. When the programs that they use become more resource hungry and consume more of the computers resources then they will still be able to use them without having to spend money on getting their machines upgraded to run them.

Maybe though you are the other type of home user that is a little more technical and wants to run two or three different types of PC but don't have the space, for the extra pc's, keyboards and monitors then virtualisation allows you to solve this problem.

Within the corporate world though this becomes a much more important situation as Servers, (Think of these as extremely powerful home computers.), that are not utilising their resources efficiently are costing money. Plus in the modern age there is also the constant pressure on big companies to make their IT infrastructures more green. what this means in essence is to reduce the power consumed and the heat generated by the equipment they run.

This is where virtualization really comes in to its own as in the long run it can save people huge amounts of operating capital costs whilst dramatically improving their green foot print.

So how does this all work then?

There is a car made by Bugatti called the Veyron, reputably the fastest production car in the world which has some 1000 horse power, which is very impressive. Trouble is that most countries in the world you cannot use this because there are speed limits in place so when you drive it the poor things is using a tiny amount of all that power.

Imagine if it was possible to split that monster engine into maybe ten smaller ones of 100hp each, then you could put these into normal family cars and make much more effective use of all that original power.

Taking that thought this is what virtualization allows us to do with today's big powerful computers.

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