Virtualization Defined - Eight Different Ways

By Alan Murphy, F5 Technical Marketing Manager, Security

This paper focuses on virtualization as it pertains to the data center; but before considering any type of data center virtualization, it's important to define what technology or category of service you're trying to virtualize. Generally speaking, virtualization falls into three categories: Operating System, Storage, and Applications. But these categories are very broad and don't adequately delineate the key aspects of data center virtualization. It's helpful to distill these broader categories into eight, specific categories to thoroughly understand the differences (and similarities) between the definitions of virtualization.