Much in the same way cats and dogs have multiple offspring, computers now have little computers living inside them - a computer litter if you will. I like to call them virtual machines (ok, so not just I, but the rest of the world calls them that as well).
The days of the operating system having the entire house to itself are over, now it has to share it with its brothers and sisters. Its almost like the PC world has gotten more poor and had to move in with ma and pa back home, only pa got a bigger house with more bedrooms, each with multiple beds (cores). Whatever allegory you choose, pc virtualization is here to stay!
If you're not familiar with virtualization or virtual machines (VM's), basically what it means is that you can run one or more operating systems (i.e. Windows XP) on top of another operating system using a piece of software. This software allows you to setup one or more virtual computers that you can then install an operating system onto. The operating system doesn't even realize that it's not a real machine because the software makes it think that it has its own hard drive, memory, cpu, motherboard, etc.
Ever since the tree-hugging eco-freaks starting blabbing their agenda across the globe (see my future article on my thoughts about that), everyone wants to be "green" and using VM's has made a pretty big dent in a lot of company's power bills (in a positive way). It allows companies to run multiple servers or even workstations on one piece of hardware. Most servers do not consume all of a server's resources all the time, so you can pack VM's on it until its resources are more fully utilized, allowing you to do more with less hardware and power consumption.
I mainly started this post to share a little about what I learned today at a lunch-n-learn session I went to today - using virtualization for disaster recovery. The LNL session was put on by a local vendor (Data Link) and IMHO the leading virtualization software company,
VMWare. VMWare's product for doing DR is called
Site Recovery Manager. It allows companies to more effectively execute and maintain a disaster recovery plan, which if you are in IT, can be a near-impossible task.
I'm all for using a product like SRM to do this, it sounds wonderful but you have to be prepared to pay the price. Is the price worth it? I think so. If at the end of a nuclear holocaust day, you can walk away with your remote data center up and running after just a few clicks, it's worth MILLIONS. Even if you never have to click that
big red button, you still have pretty good bragging rights that you even own a big red button.
Hey, I think someone should wire one of those button thingys into SRM, it would be a great action shot for ThinkGeek.
