VIRTUALIZATION

Latest buzzword doing circles these days. Well it deserves all the attention. It's a wonderful new technique. What is entails is make your desktop with the operating system installation/files and settings as a single file which may be accessed at any terminal within the network. The central server allows you to create virtual machines. In these machines the good thing is they can be accessed from terminal having any physical configuration (to a limit). So what's the use of this. Well the easy migration removes the down time to almost zero Once your terminal has any technical difficulties you just switch to a new. While for this we generally need a redundancy plan to survive any technical problems - here a few standby terminals do the same work. Also a single machine runs a single operating system in a simple PC. So we need say 20 terminals for 20 operations. But in case of a virtual machine concept we can have the same operations in about 6-8 terminals. A terminal generally has an average 20% usage and a peak of 50%. But all operations do not show peak usage at the same time. So we put 3-4 operations in each terminal. When any process seems to show peak usage some process is shifted to another terminal which is under lower stress. Thus we have maximum utilization of resources. The hardware and power cost savings are considerable. This is more prominent is data warehousing units. The efficiency levels can be boosted by up-to 40-50%