Virtualization is clearly having a major impact across the IT industry. Viewed broadly, virtualization involves decoupling workloads and data from the functional details of the physical platforms on which they are hosted. This decoupling increases the flexibility with which the workloads and data can be matched with physical resources, enabling administrators to develop business-driven policies for delivering resources that are appropriate given specific time, cost, and service-level requirements. As a result, virtualization potentially enables IT operations to be performed with far better economies of scale, maximizing the utilization of existing resources by allowing infrastructures to be managed efficiently, even as they undergo high rates of growth.

In the short term, server virtualization can help to solve some specific problems faced by IT managers today, such as enabling consolidation and improved resource utilization; reducing the hardware footprint and its associated power and cooling requirements; providing better agility from simplified resource provisioning; simplifying high availability and disaster recovery; improving test and development processes; and lengthening the lifespan of legacy applications.

Operating systems need to support virtualization in three ways: server partitioning, which enables multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on one computer; support for virtual infrastructure, in which virtualization is used for load-balancing and High Availability purposes; and support for virtualization management tools, which are optimized for control of virtualized workloads.

Click on one of the links below to see how the UNIX systems compare in supporting these virtualization functions:

	Server Partitioning (23 ratings)
	Virtual Infrastructure Support (7 ratings)
	Virtualization Management (6 ratings)