DOC-516 Quand l'infonuagique rencontre la virtualisation

*NOTE : Cet article n'est présentement disponible qu'en anglais.By Daniel Lajoie, Optcom

First of all, what type of ‘Cloud' manager are you?

• You are already using various forms of Cloud Computing and are planning a long-term strategy.
• Maybe we're preaching to the converted – you understand that one of the advantages of using all sorts of flexible Cloud Computing models is that they represent sustainable ways to help maintain a competitive edge.
• You are an IT leader who is very knowledgeable in the area of technology, but you don't know exactly how Cloud Computing (public, private or a hybrid combination of both), works.
• You need to understand how Cloud Computing changes IT and what you need to do to support the company using Cloud Computing as an important tool.
• You are an entrepreneur who wants his or her IT resources to be an optimized utility that takes advantage of what you have already paid for – you want IT to respond to your business needs.
• You want to be able to implement your strategy according to your timelines – you want IT to be your partner in innovating for the future.

Since the late 50s, the idea of running several programs in parallel has quickly gained in popularity. There was talk about time sharing, multiprogramming, etc. The idea was to have several programs cohabitate simultaneously, with each program having access to the same hardware, but not interfering with one another. Virtualization is very close to this concept.

For the past few years, Virtualization and Cloud Computing have been a focus of companies in the information technology domain. The fact is that with the emergence of numerous projects involving Virtualization, market players are more and more powerful, whether in the proprietary sector with Microsoft and VMware, or in the open software sector,. Just look at the number of conferences related to these technologies, not to mention the number of press articles (both online and on paper) about the subject. This rise in power did not come about by chance: it is very closely related to market demand, which is turning more and more towards these technologies.

Wikipedia defines Virtualization as: "overall hardware and/or software techniques that allow for several operating systems and/or several applications to operate on a single machine, separately from one another, just as if they were running on physically separate machines."

So the idea is to use just one physical machine to replace several machines and use the possibilities that Virtualization provides to increase the number of virtual machines.