What Is Virtualization?

Virtualization creates a simulated (or virtual) environment in place of a physical computing environment. Virtualization often involves computer-generated versions of hardware, operating systems, storage devices and more. This lets organizations partition a single physical computer or server into many virtual machines. Although each virtual machine shares the resources of a single host machine, it can operate independently and run different operating systems or applications.

By creating multiple resources from a single computer or server, virtualization improves scalability and workload handling, while allowing fewer servers to be used in total, less energy to be consumed, and infrastructure costs and maintenance needs to be reduced. There are four main categories of virtualization. The first is desktop virtualization, which allows a single central server to deliver and manage individualized desktops. The second is network virtualization, designed to divide network bandwidth into independent channels and assign those channels to specific servers or devices. The third category is software virtualization, which separates applications from the hardware and the operating system. The fourth is storage virtualization, which combines various network storage resources into what appears as a single storage device so that multiple users can access it.