What is Virtualization?

Virtualization is technology that allows you to create multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a single, physical hardware system. Software called a hypervisor connects directly to that hardware and allows you to split 1 system into separate, distinct, and secure environments known as virtual machines (VMs). These VMs rely on the hypervisor’s ability to separate the machine’s resources from the hardware and distribute them appropriately. Virtualization helps you get the most value from previous investments.

Benefits of Virtualization.

Virtualizing resources lets administrators pool their physical resources, so their hardware can truly be commoditized. So the legacy infrastructure that’s expensive to maintain, but supports important apps, can be virtualized for optimal use.

Administrators no longer have to wait for every app to be certified on new hardware; just set up the environment, migrate the VM, and everything works as before. During regression tests, a testbed can be created or copied easily, eliminating the need for dedicated testing hardware or redundant development servers. With the right training and knowledge, these environments can be further optimized to gain greater capabilities and density.

Virtualization Security

Virtualization is an elegant solution to many common security problems. In environments where security policies require systems separated by a firewall, those 2 systems could safely reside on the same physical box. In a development environment, each developer can have their own sandbox, immune from another developer’s rogue or runaway code.

Why Choose Red Hat for Virtualization

Because you can use more of the hardware you have to run the systems you’re familiar with on one of the world’s most powerful virtualization infrastructures.We’ve supported virtualization development for a long time—improving the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and contributing to KVM and oVirt since both communities were founded. The KVM hypervisor is now the core of all major OpenStack^® and Linux^® virtualization distributions, and it’s set records for overall performance and for running the largest quantity of well-performing VMs on a single server.

All this is open source, which means it’s designed for, tested, and certified on all kinds of hardware. We’ve even collaborated with Microsoft, so you can deploy VMs on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux or even manage hundreds of Windows-based VMs using a single virtualization product.