Server Virtualization
Virtualization is an abstraction layer that allows multiple virtual machines, with varied operating systems (Linux, BSD, Unix, Solaris, Microsoft) to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine. By decoupling the physical hardware from the operating system, virtualization allows you to:
- Run multiple virtual machines with heterogeneous operating systems at the same time on the same physical machine
- Create fully configured isolated virtual machines with it's own set of virtual hardware to run an operating system and applications
- Rapidly save, copy and provision virtual machines that can be moved from one physical server to another for workload consolidation and zero downtime maintenance
Elastic Computing
Elastic Computing is an approach to application development and deloyment that enables hardware, bandwidth and storage resource usage in a flexible and elastic way. Each system can be scaled on the fly, without affecting other applications deployed on the grid. Typically Elastic Computing is achieved on a Virtualized Grid environment via a elastic hosting platform. A virtualized image is deployed to dozens (possibly hundreds or thousands) of servers acting as one. Traditionally you would deploy a single operating system to a single machine. Elastic Computing runs an virtualized operating system (Linux, Windows, *Nix) on many servers all at once.
An elastic platform is data-driven, which means that no human interaction is needed to add and reduce resources applied to a given application elastically adjusting to meet system demand / requirements and billed on a usage basis.
