Personal computing and the power of illusion [virtualisation

Abstract

In computing, what you see is not always the same as what you have - as PC users could soon be learning to their advantage. Virtualisation is a powerful computing technique: by presenting a logical, rather than physical view of resources, we can improve security, flexibility, manageability and, crucially, share and redistribute underlying physical resources such as memory, processors and networks. Operating systems allow many applications to share a single computer; virtual networks add enhanced security to a shared network and storage virtualisation offers increased manageability and fault resilience.