Virtualisation – what it is, and how it could help you

You may have heard of the term "virtualisation" – or "virtualization", if you're using American English. You may even understand it, but many of us are not yet clear about what it means literally as well as well what it means for the future of computing. I'll try and explain what I understand of it.

If you look at the Wikipedia definition, it says: "In computing, virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources…"

The Wikipedia article goes on to list around 20 different variations what are considered to be virtualisation, and each area is worth looking into in depth, but we'll just concentrate on the broad definition and how it may affect the vast majority of people who use the internet for work or home activities.

Essentially, in short, virtualisation is a process that makes a large collection of servers act as one single entity with lots of features. And these features can include different operating systems and different software that work on those operating systems.

So, let's say you have a Windows machine, and you're curious about what it would be like to own a Mac, but don't want to spend the relatively large amount of money that it would cost to buy one. You just want to try it out for a few days. In theory, you could visit an appropriate website and click a few buttons and within minutes your computer could be connected to a virtualised Apple computer.

You could then choose the option of having your Windows machine act like an Apple, and, of course, vice versa. Maybe for a small fee. Basically, like renting a virtual computer. It's a service that your ISP or your web hosting company may well provide as standard in the future.

The single biggest reason that makes this kind of activity attractive is software compatibility issues. If you've been a longtime professional designer, for example, the tradition is that you use a Mac and the best design software, such as Adobe Creative Suite, has been optimised for Mac. So if you own a PC and would just like to use a Mac to design something, you should be able to connect to your virtualisation centre and just hire the Mac and that software to complete your task and then go back to your using your Windows machine in the way it was meant to be used. All of this saves you from having to buy and install software that you only need temporarily.

All this swapping of identities between Windows, Apple and other systems such as Linux, make the whole question of what kind of machine you buy irrelevant, because whatever machine you buy should be able to connect to a virtualisation centre and then act like whatever machine you want it to and use whatever software you want to.

From the virtualisation providers' point of view, the market they foresee for their services are huge. The idea that people will no longer have to buy expensive software and go through the trouble of installing it on their machines only to find that a new version is available within months of their investment… basically, virtualisation is a great idea.

Years ago, Larry Ellison of Oracle talked about a machine, which he called an NC as a play on the PC acronym. He described it as being a machine with lots of random access memory (RAM), which would be needed to connect to the server and use whatever operating system and software that's available on the server. He explained that none of the software needed to be on your machine.

It's like this… say you have a server at your business and your staff members have different computers – Mac, PC, Linux. Using a virtualisation system, you will be able to offer them each access to the server in whatever way they like, because the server itself will act like a Mac server, Windows server or Linux server – because it has the software to enable it to do so.

This software is what's called the virtualiser, or hypervisor. Think of it like a browser, with which you can view the areas of the servers and which parts of it you would like to use. The "browser" names include VMWare Fusion, Parallels and VirtualBox.

Virtualisation has a long way to go before it becomes a mass market success, and there are many technical challenges that are yet to be overcome, but it's already one of the fastest growing areas of the computer industry. Businesses have taken up virtualisation, but not in large numbers. But even with the few customers that virtualisation service providers have, it's easy to see how the sector will grow in importance and easy to see how money can be made in the sector.