What's happening on UAT's campus- A blog published by UAT Students.

Long ago, people were starting to run into the problem of needing to access many servers at the same time, but each server only running at a smidge of its potential. Thus Virtualization was born. Virtualization is the process of taking a real physical system and creating virtual components for it. With this technique you can create an entire computer including its operating system within your own computer. 

For businesses that need a lot of servers to handle many requests, this is a life-saver. Now instead of having to purchase hundreds of servers, they only have to buy a few and they can create many virtual servers that run on a single physical server. This makes their business run much more efficiently with time, money, and productivity. 

Virtualization makes the IT side of businesses easily scalable and maneuverable. You can trade out the virtual hardware with different pieces of virtual hardware much faster than if you had to uninstall and reinstall that equipment in the physical world. Just as well, if you need to move your database, you can just move the virtual machine as if it were a file on your computer. Because it is. 

If you need 10 servers that only need 2 Gigabytes of RAM, you could buy 10 servers with 16 gigs of RAM, but that would be wasteful. Instead, you can buy one server with 32 gigs of RAM and create 10 virtual servers within that server, and if your RAM requirements increase, then you still have room. And if you need more servers, you just have to create another virtual server on the physical one you already own. 

The possibilities are limitless, and when you combine this technology with other innovative techniques like cloud computing, VPNs, and more, then you can really start to create some change in the world. 

--Kody Mitchell

keywords: virtualization, advancing computer science, computer science, software engineering, network engineering