Virtual Infrastructure
The introduction
of virtualization technology presents a number of opportunities for
driving capital and operational efficiency above and beyond the
simple benefit of safe partitioning. VMware's customers have
harnessed the power of virtualization to better manage IT capacity,
to provide better service levels, and to streamline IT processes.
We have coined a term for virtualizing the IT infrastructure–we call
it the virtual infrastructure.
What is a Virtual
Infrastructure?
In essence, a virtual
infrastructure is a dynamic mapping of physical resources to
business needs. While a virtual machine represents the physical
resources of a single computer, a virtual infrastructure represents
the physical resources of the entire IT environment, aggregating x86
computers and their attached network and storage into a unified pool
of IT resources.
Structurally, a virtual
infrastructure consists of the following components:
- Single-node
hypervisors to enable full virtualization of each x86 computer.
- A set of
virtualization-based distributed system infrastructure services
such as resource management to optimize available resources
among virtual machines.
- Automation
solutions that provide special capabilities to optimize a
particular IT process such as provisioning or disaster recovery.
By decoupling the
entire software environment from its underlying hardware
infrastructure, virtualization enables the aggregation of multiple
servers, storage infrastructure and networks into shared pools of
resources that can be delivered dynamically, securely and reliably
to applications as needed. This pioneering approach enables
organizations to build a computing infrastructure with high levels
of utilization, availability, automation and flexibility using
building blocks of inexpensive industry-standard servers. |
