01-01-01 What is Virtualization

To help you understand how VMware Virtual Infrastructure works, let’s first provide some background on VMware’s virtualization technology. To start with I am going to compare what are the differences between a traditional hardware server and a virtual server? The traditional physical hardware server has devices such as disks, network cards, memory, CPU and so on; and software including an operating system and applications.Let’s take a look at the Virtual Server. Server virtualization allows you to slice and dice a single box into smaller virtual servers. It takes a physical system (hardware, operating system, and applications) along with the operating system and everything installed in the operating system and packages them into what we call a “virtual machine”.
The Server virtualization layer, also known as the VMkernel, runs on the native hardware. It manages all the operating systems on the physical machine. The so called Virtualization layer is represented by ESX Server.