Open Virtualization

OPEN VIRTUALIZATION

Submitted By

Preethi Srikanth

‘H2' - FT11281

Abstract

For many organizations, one of the best strategies to ensure that the data centre assets are utilised in a better manner is Virtualization. Virtualization solutions also help businesses to manage their IT resources better and achieve greater reliability. But today, open-source virtualization solutions from Sun offer organizations feature-rich, high-functionality software. The software provides innovative technologies developed in the open-source community as well as freedom from vendor lock-in.

Executive Summary

In today's world, most of the computing resources are not utilized efficiently. In order to get the most from such underutilized resources, Virtualization has become unavoidable. Underutilization is so usual because computers are very powerful; even an inexpensive computer running a typical Web application is only about 5% utilized. Through Virtualization, we can make one computer appear to be multiple systems, thus allowing it to host multiple services. This saves money for the enterprises by allowing them to utilize their existing resources efficiently and make the most of their new investments in servers.

In addition, organizations are finding virtualization valuable as a way to improve IT management, reliability and flexibility.

• As Virtualization allows for more flexible management of resources, it improves the IT management.

• In virtual environment, it will be easy to failover to another machine whenever necessary and to quickly restart virtual machines and applications, thereby increasing the reliability.

• Flexibility, by being able to readily build up and tear down virtual data centers based on changing business needs

For even greater flexibility and the improvement of more functionality, businesses are discovering the potential advantages of open-source virtualization. In particular, Sun open source solutions for virtualization at the server, client, and operating system levels have become increasingly popular, offering various degrees of flexibility and functionality that often far exceeds those offered by proprietary solutions.

Virtualization throughout the Technology Environment

To understand why open source is important in virtualization of hardware and operating system, it helps to understand how virtualization is used at the server, client, and OS levels.

• Server virtualization