An Introduction to Virtualization

Introduction

Over the course of the past couple of months, the AnandTech IT team has been putting a lot of time into mapping out and clarifying the inner workings of several interesting forms of virtualization. The purpose of these articles was not primarily to cover "news" (however current the topic might be), but to create a sort of knowledge base on this subject at AnandTech, as we find many people interested in learning more about virtualization are met with a large amount of misinformation. Secondly, we believe a better knowledge on the subject will empower the people in control of their company's IT infrastructure and help them make the correct decisions for the job.

There's no denying that virtualization is changing company's server rooms all over the world. It is promoting both innovation and the preservation of aged applications that would otherwise not survive a migration to modern hardware platforms. Virtualization is completely redefining the rules of what can and cannot be done in a server environment, adding a versatility to it that is increasing with every new release. We believe that when making big changes to any existing system, the more information that is available to the people given that task, the better.

But what about desktop users?

While the above should make it clear why businesses are extremely interested in this technology, and why we have been digging so deep into its inner workings, we are also noticing an increased interest from the rest of our reader base, and have been flooded with questions about the how and why of all these different kinds of virtualization. Since we don't want to leave any interested people out in the cold, and the in-depth articles may seem a bit daunting to anyone looking to get an introduction, here is another article in our "virtualization series". In it, we will attempt to guide our readers through the different technologies and their actual uses, along with some interesting tidbits for regular desktop users.