Let’s say you have a computer with a good hardware configuration: (e.g 16GB DDR3, SSD drives and a very good ). You want to use this machine as a server, so you connect it to Internet, you already have a static IP address and you will host your customer small business’ website using the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP).

This server with its actual configuration (16GB DDR3 memory ..etc) could probably host hundreds if not thousands of small websites, you can actually use it for many customers ! This is when virtualization.

Virtualization is a way to partitioning one physical server into several virtual servers, or machines. These machines are called guests and will share the same hardware of the host server.

Every virtual machine acts like “normal machine”, it can be accessed separately, it can have an IP address ..etc

Using a hypervisor, a system engineer could create multiple machines using a single physical one.

- VMware Workstation
- VMware Player
- VirtualBox
- Parallels Desktop for Mac,
- QEM,
- Xen,
- Oracle VM Server for SPARC,
- Oracle VM Server for x86,
- Microsoft Hyper-V
- VMware ESX/ESXi

All of the above are examples of hypervisor technologies used in the IT industry.

Virtualization saves money and resources and makes software installation and system administration easier. It is also good for the environement !