BANGALORE, INDIA: It took a long time for virtualization to be accepted as a mainstream technology. The technology, which has been around for over a decade now, is slowly making its way into the mainstream and today enterprises vow on the benefits it provide.

Let's hear it from Somak Roy, managing analyst, Butler Group, who talks at length in an interview with CIOL, about what comprises the virtual space and who are the key players of this world.

CIOL: What are the different varieties of virtualization?

Somak Roy: Virtualization is of different types:

Server Virtualization
Server virtualization is about consolidating servers to get more out of existing hardware and avoiding the capital expenditure involved in acquiring new hardware. The very nature of the technology helps increase flexibility, as new servers and additional capacity can be provisioned easily.

This helps in scaling applications on demand, provisioning servers for development and testing teams, disaster recovery, high performance computing, etc. Also, by increasing capacity utilization and avoiding new hardware procurement, carbon footprint of the enterprise and the data centre size remains manageable.

Data centres with the right power, cooling, and connectivity infrastructure comes increasingly at a premium, and therefore making most out of existing data centre space makes sense to most enterprises.

Endpoint Virtualization
Endpoint virtualization can mean any of the three fundamentally different types of technologies:
Desktop virtualization: Where a full desktop image, with the OS, applications, data, and settings, is managed as a server hosted file or a set of files, and is transmitted to the end point hardware.

The end point hardware could be a thin client with a very low OS footprint or alternatively a traditional desktop. Also, the remotely distributed desktop image could be combined with application delivered through other technologies to present a 'desktop environment'.

Application virtualization: Which involves packaging an application, such that it operates as a self-contained unit, independent of other applications that are processed in the same endpoint, such as a desktop, workstation, or laptop.

Presentation virtualization: Which involves hosting the application in the data centre, and transmitting only the presentation elements to the end user and back.