Virtualization Primer

Several Microsoft products support virtualization technologies, although not all of the products may come to mind when considering virtualization. Three specific types of virtualization can deliver cost savings, but organizations may find a lower return on investment (ROI) than expected because of the complexities and inefficiencies the technologies do not solve. Understanding how each technology is useful, how it is limited, and how they can be combined can help organizations make the most of them.

Virtualization Fundamentals

Virtualization is the act of creating a synthetic environment that can mimic or act like a physical environment; this synthetic environment can run software as if it were the actual environment. Generally, this allows an operating system environment (OSE) to deliver more services than it could otherwise.

Microsoft products offer three types of virtualization in one or more forms in the Windows Server and Windows client OS:

Hardware virtualization allows a hypervisor, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V, to present an abstracted set of hardware to one or more OSs (called guests). This allows each OS instance to run in its own virtual machines (VMs) on a host OS that is running on the physical hardware (environment).