Like modern warfare the computing giants have extended the battlefield into the clouds. Any commercial computing magazines or website you read today will make mention of cloud computing. IT suppliers all over the world are now singing its praises and how it can help your business.

In September Microsfot Launch its Virtualization products below are links to some of the vedios. They offer a good insight into where microsoft vitualization technology is today in comparison to its competitors.

"Analyst predicts that almost half of all servers in every large business will be virtualized by 2010. But med-sized business have been slower to embrace virtualization, in spite of processor virtualization at under 15 percent and virtualization easier and cheaper to implement".

Today, virtual operating systems from companies such as Microsoft, VMware, SWsoft and XenSource allow companies of all size to take advantage of hardware that would have made yesterday's IT managers salivate in envy. Multicore processors, inexpensive system memory and commodity-priced massive disk drives are putting the disk farms and mainframes of years ago into a small chassis.

Virtualization is arguably one of the most abused words in the tech industry in 2006. Virtualization is different things to different vendors depending on what is appended to it.  Server and operating system (OS) vendors like IBM, HP and VMware define it as the masking of server resources, including processor and OS, into multiple, isolated virtual environments. Why do you want to do this?

What is Machine Virtualization Management MVM?: PVM [Parallel Virtual Machine] is a software package that permits a heterogeneous collection of Unix and/or Windows computers hooked together by a network to be used as a single large parallel computer. PVM is widely used in distributed computing.

Often a server or workstation just has one operating system. For example, XP or Vista on workstations, and, Windows 2003 server. Virtualization enables support of multiple operating systems, as in Vista OR Windows 2000. It's also possible to have several copies of Windows 2003 running currently: one for SQL, one for files, and one for finance.
Underemployed Resources

In a fiercely competitive auto industry, Mazda North America depends on IT to inject the same “Zoom-Zoom” that characterizes their cars into its business operations. As Mazda’s IT initiatives such as increasing field managers’ effectiveness grew, so did its server count – from 150 to nearly 300. “With a one-application-per-server approach and pressure to heighten system availability, all we could see was server sprawl.

Virtualization offers many solutions to many issues system administrators face on a day-to-day basis. In this article I will be looking at server virtualization, it pros and it cons and what business leaders need to do before they take the plunge.

You know you need a web host, but you don't know where to start. So you do a web search to research potential solutions and get a bit overwhelmed with all the jargon: UNIX, dedicated servers, POP3, CoLo... the list goes on.