by Angela Guess
Dan Kusnetzky recently wrote in Virtualization Review, “In the final days of 2015, several of my clients pointed to statements made by representatives of certain software suppliers that essentially equated virtualization to the use of virtual machine (VM) software, or hypervisors, to create a more dynamic computing environment on industry-standard machines. They asked me to explain (for the gazillionth time) why I thought virtualization was a much larger topic. I believe that I won them over to a more expansive view of the topic. Do you still think that the use of virtualization and the use of virtual machine software are the same topic?”
Kusnetzky goes on, “Virtualization is the use of excess machine capacity to create a logical, artificial environment that offers features, functions and capabilities beyond those offered by the underlying physical computing environment alone. The concept applies to many different areas of computing, including: How individuals interact with systems; How applications interact with operating systems; How operating systems interact with systems; How systems interact with both networks and storage; How the computing environment can be managed and made secure. There, I said it. While virtual machine software certainly fits in the ‘how operating systems interact with systems’ category, it is only one part of how this concept can be applied to processing.”
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