Installation guide

In essence, virtualization increases flexibility by decoupling an operating system and the services
and applications supported by that system from a specific physical hardware platform. It allows the
establishment of multiple virtual environments on a shared hardware platform.
Organizations looking to innovate find that the ability to create new systems and services without
installing additional hardware (and to quickly tear down those systems and services when they are
no longer needed) can be a significant boost to innovation.
Among possible approaches are the rapid establishment of development systems for the creation of
custom software, the ability to quickly set up test environments, the capability to provision alternate
software solutions and compare them without extensive hardware investments, support for rapid
prototyping and agile development environments, and the ability to quickly establish new production
services on demand.
These environments can be created in house or provisioned externally, as with Amazon’s EC2
offering. Since the cost to create a new virtual environment can be very low, and can take advantage
of existing hardware, innovation can be facilitated and accelerated with minimal investment.
Virtualization can also excel at supporting innovation through the use of virtual environments for
training and learning. These services are ideal applications for virtualization technology. A student
can start course work with a known, standard system environment. Class work can be isolated from
the production network. Learners can establish unique software environments without demanding
exclusive use of hardware resources.
As the capabilities of virtual environments continue to grow, we’re likely to see increasing use of
virtualization to enable portable environments tailored to the needs of a specific user. These
environments can be moved dynamically to an accessible or local processing environment,
regardless of where the user is located. The user’s virtual environments can be stored on the network
or carried on a portable memory device.
A related concept is the Appliance Operating System, an application package oriented operating
system designed to run in a virtual environment. The package approach can yield lower development
and support costs as well as insuring the application runs in a known, secure environment. An
Appliance Operating System solution provides benefits to both application developers and the
consumers of those applications.
How these applications of virtualization technology apply in your enterprise will vary. If you are
already using the technology in more than one of the areas noted above, consider an additional
investment in a solution requiring rapid development. If you haven’t started with virtualization, start
with a training and learning implementation to develop skills, then move on to application
development and testing. Enterprises with broader experience in virtualization should consider
implementing portable virtual environments or application appliances.
Virt u aliz at io n f o r C o st Savin g s
Virtualization can also be used to lower costs. One obvious benefit comes from the consolidation of
servers into a smaller set of more powerful hardware platforms running a collection of virtual
environments. Not only can costs be reduced by reducing the amount of hardware and reducing the
amount of unused capacity, but application performance can actually be improved since the virtual
guests execute on more powerful hardware.
Further benefits include the ability to add hardware capacity in a non-disruptive manner and to
dynamically migrate workloads to available resources.
Depending on the needs of your organization, it may be possible to create a virtual environment for
disaster recovery. Introducing virtualization can significantly reduce the need to replicate identical
hardware environments and can also enable testing of disaster scenarios at lower cost.
Virtualization provides an excellent solution for addressing peak or seasonal workloads. If you have
Preface
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