Physical Versus Virtual Servers

Mainframes have been doing it for ages, and other non-x86 operating systems have been slicing up servers for quite some time as well. According to this report on The Register, however, this is the decade of x86 virtualization.

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Virtualization technologies are not a new, in fact mainframes and non-x86 operating systems have been virtualized for a long time.

"Virtualization went mainstream in the noughties. It graduated from a technology almost exclusively used in large enterprise servers, to something so common that even smaller SMEs are using it for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments.

"With VDI, the actual work your users do on their desktop is not performed on the computer in front of them. They use a remote access application (for example RDP or X11 forwarding) to connect to a virtual operating system living on a server somewhere. The computer they are accessing from doesn’t actually matter all that much. It could be a many kilodollar gaming rig, a cheap thin client or even a mobile phone."

Read the Full Story at The Register