The Great Virtualisation Secret

Following the releases of Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V and VMWare there has been a lot of discussion as to who will win the virtualisation war.

Both these offerings have taken virtualisation to a new level by offering systems that integrate virtualisation directly into the operating system or do they....

Over the last few years, we’ve seen innovative developments in virtualisation such as the implementation of virtualisation technology within the CPU (Central Processing Unit). 

For example, many modern processors now have additional registers that are accelerating memory management between the physical hosts and the virtual guest operating systems.

Benefits of Paravirtualisation

The logical next step was to have operating systems include virtualisation as part of their core functionality to take advantage of a technique known as paravirtualisation.

Having a parvirtualised environment means substantial savings in memory and processing costs due to the increase of up to 50% in performance achieved compared to 'classic' virtualisation.

This may not seem like much if you only have a few servers but adds up to a significant amount if you have a hundred plus file servers.

In addition, performance increases of up to 50%, makes virtualisation of some applications such as databases a greater viability than before which can result in substantial cost savings from consolidation and management of database applications into a virtual environment.