Virtualization Comparison

Presenter: David Egan

Description:The concept of virtualization goes back to the early days of all modern operating systems. The earliest programs just ran on top of a basic set of Input/Output (I/O) services. To facilitate multiple programs running at the same time, the application memory space was 'virtualized' such that each application had its own memory stack provided by the operating system.

The latest rave is the Hardware Virtualization where a specialized operating system, usually referred to as the hyper-visor, went one step further and presented 'virtual hardware' to the operating system that ran in its own 'virtual' memory space.

The market leader is VMWare. Other big players include Xen from the open source world since 2004 and this year Microsoft has added their own version called Hyper-V.

The market leader has set some very high standards and requires some very specialized hardware. The others 2 lessen the dependence on specialized hardware and open up more hardware options with less of the sophistication of the market leader.

This seminar will delve into the many problems that Virtualized Hardware solutions can fix and show how the big 3 mentioned above are handling these situations.