Storage Area Networks For Dummies®

Chapter 15
Everything You Ever Wanted to
Know about Virtualization
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding the meaning of virtualization
▶ Knowing why virtualization is a good thing
▶ Exploring how virtualization is used
If you’ve been anywhere near the computer industry in the last few years,
you have come across the term virtualization. Everyone talks about it,
but not many understand why there is so much buzz about it. This chapter
covers what storage virtualization means, how and where it is used, and
how you can take advantage of it in your company to reduce costs. Since
this book is about SAN storage, I cover server virtualization only briefly and
direct most of the chapter’s focus on storage virtualization and its uses.
Understanding What Virtualization Is
If you look up the term virtualization on the Internet, you will get thousands
of results covering multiple areas of interest. You can find everything from
virtual people (known as avatars) and virtual stores (ever shop on eBay or
Amazon?) to virtual places (such as online gaming worlds).
When it comes to technology, many companies have overused and overhyped
the term virtualization, which has led to confusion. Simply put, virtualization
means abstraction. The virtualization solution abstracts the underlying details
and complexity of whatever it is virtualizing. As an example of how confusing
the marketing of virtualization can be, some companies that perform simple
RAID functionality (see Chapter 2 for more on RAID) in their storage arrays
sometimes market their solutions as a virtual array, simply because the RAID
component abstracts multiple underlying physical disks into looking like a
single device. RAID technology is available in almost every storage array, so