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Virtualization has been getting a significant amount of coverage in the IT press. Open almost any IT trade publication in the last six months and there are numerous articles about virtualization. It brings to mind the movie “Multiplicity,” or the scientists that are currently involved in “cloning.” So what is the entire buzz about? And what does it mean to us, the legal community?

The fact of the matter is virtualization is a 20-year-old technology/concept whose roots came from mainframe systems that has moved into x86 (PC, server) platforms. Wikipedia describes the concept of virtualizing servers as “a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers such that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine.”

Each server is compartmentalized such that it is completely independent of any other virtual server that also resides on that physical hardware. Each virtual server can run its own operating system (i.e., Windows NT, 2000, 2003, 2007, Linux, Novell Netware, etc.) and each server is completely independent of the other servers on the physical server. Several of the software vendors have taken it a step further, enabling portability, movement from one physical device to another, load balancing (think of it as clustering on the fly) and other features that make it a very compelling technology.

Check out this article discussing virtualization. It’s a technology that’s here to stay and if leveraged with the right business processes and technology, can be an effective platform for business. Being able to abstract elements of the infrastructure from the application can enable you to more effectively adjust resources in line with the business need, and be less locked down to a specific platform – that the system board has failed on one of the ESX servers might not cause disruption to the end user, at worst it might affect performance, but it should not constitute a loss in service.

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