In a constantly changing business environment the ability to efficiently manage and improve the IT infrastructure is a never-ending task. The desire to reduce IT costs and the need for efficiency and flexibility has brought about a transformation of the IT terrain through the process of virtualization. This process allows you to transform hardware into software, therefore opening up greater resources and applications. The introduction of the VMWare virtualization platforms and of the VMWare ESX Server has made the landscape look much less undulated.

The VMWare ESX Server is a server partitioning tool designed to enable one server, to employ many guest operating systems at the same time. This software has tools that designates server resources to a particular guest and limits resource usage based on simple policies whenever there is multiple demand for a particular resource. At present guests can only access one single processor in the host server.

This VMWare Virtulization platform supports a number of guest operating systems including Linux and Windows, the more popular ones of the lot. There is a limit of no more than sixty-four concurrent guest operating systems that can be supported when operating on the maximum sixteen processors.

There are also memory management techniques to allow the configuring and running of virtual machines with memory that is greater than that on the system.

Based on a Linux kernel, the VMWare ESX Server is very simple to install. By simply using the CD-ROM, installation can begin. Installation should take no more than fifteen minutes. When installed the VMWare ESX Server, will be controlled through a Web-based console and access to virtual machines is done via network-based remote control tools.

Users have a great deal of control with this software and the ability to lock a particular guest to designated processors and resources is a unique feature. The VMWare ESX Server does not run as an application over Linux or windows, it runs its own operating system. Because of this it gives a far superior performance with a full set of features.

The console of this VMWare Virtulization platform is loaded with menus and forms that can create partitions and different kinds of system maintenance for guests. In order to create more partitions users must log into the main ESX Linux console and employ standard Linux tools.

It is also possible in this VMWare Virtulization platform to restrict guests to using only a percentage of the CPU, network and RAM resources of the host system. Guests can also be restricted to one or more processors.

Because server administrators will need unlimited access to guest operating systems, the VMWare Virtulization platform gives them adequate remote control tools so access through Linux and Windows is possible. So a number of clients are able to access a particular guest at the same time.

With this software, it’s enabling a wide spectrum of applications and usage such as recovery, isolation, resource sharing, availability and the general reconfiguration situations. It is a very good option for those companies that have the need to run several operating systems all at once, on the same server hardware.