Something happened on the way to a meeting the other day. I was standing in line at a “major caffeinated beverage chain”, and there was this guy passing out cards to everybody. He was just walking down the line of people handing business cards. When he got to me he handed me his card and there was a “major caffeinated beverage chain” gift card behind it. I didn’t think a whole lot about it, other than to enjoy the fact that my drink was going to be paid for.

As I was waiting for my “caffeinated beverage” I noticed that this guy was giving out a lot of those cards.  At $5 per card, I estimated he gave away over $150 just while I was there. I couldn’t imaging how much he was giving away over the course of the morning.

Later in the morning, when I finally had access to a computer I pulled out his business card and the “major caffeinated beverage chain” gift card and decided to look them up. The business card listed a URL and had “in 2 months” written on it. When I tried to pull up the web site there was just a “website under construction” page, so I assumed that’s what the “in 2 months” was referring to.

So next I went to the “major caffeinated beverage chain” web site and punched in the card number and pin to find out how much was still available on it. I nearly choked on my “major caffeinated beverage” when the page said the balance was $96.42! That’s when I realized this guy handed me a $100 gift card, and had handed these out to at least 20 just while I was there.

I have no idea what this web site is going to promote, but I am certainly going to check it out then it’s online. I’ll make sure I update everyone when I find out more.

So what is virtualization? Wikipedia defines virtualization as:

“virtualization is the process of presenting a logical grouping or subset of computing resources so that they can be accessed in ways that give benefits over the original configuration. This new virtual view of the resources is not restricted by the implementation, geographic location or the physical configuration of underlying resources. Commonly virtualized resources include computing power and data storage.”

So what does that really mean, and why did it take so long for this technology to surface?

Virtualization has been around for a long time in many forms. Take the Apache web server for example. Apache can host multiple websites from 1 location. In the apache configuration file these are referred to as “Virtual Hosts”. This gives apache to present multiple web sites as if wach had it’s own server.

Server virtualization technologies work in a similar manner. Products like VMware take a single piece of physical hardware, and presents multiple “virtual machines”. To the operating system, these virtual machines look, feel, smell, and taste like physical hardware. When the operating system scans what it sees as a PCI bus, it’s going to find what it thinks is a real NIC, a real SCSI adapter, a real disk.

VMware can do this because the majority of servers do not utilize a server’s full resourses. In fact, the majority of systems are only 10% utilized. This means that 90% of that systems CPU, RAM, NIC bandwidth, and disk I/O are not being used. By taking those unused resources and sharing them between multiple virtual machines allows you to get 80 to 90% utilization from your hardware.

Higher utilization means more processing power for your dollar, ruble, peso, or whatever denomination you use.

After some work, VI411.org is finally online.

It’s nice that I’m finally online just as VMware is releasing Virtual Infrastructure 3. I will however, be talking a lot about VMware, as well as a whole host of other Virtualization products that are on the market right now. We’ll talk about them all.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the posts..