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become easier. Other tasks that were simple become more complicated. The lack
of a one-to-one relationship between workload and physical computer presents
a new challenge for many people. Also, a new opportunity—moving a workload
from one computer to another while the workload is active—offers its own chal-
lenges, including keeping track of the workloads that you are trying to manage.
Fortunately, you can choose from a set of tools that aim to simplify the task
of virtualization management. These tools perform hardware discovery, OS pro-
visioning, workload provisioning, configuration management, resource manage-
ment, performance monitoring and tuning, security configuration and compliance
reporting, network configuration, and updating of OS and application software.
This topic is discussed in the use case “Flexible, Rapid Provisioning” and in
Chapter 9, “Virtualization Management.”
This section describes some of the uses for system virtualization:
General workload consolidation: resource management and availability
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Asynchronous workloads: balancing resource utilization throughout the day
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Software development: consolidation of similar environments
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Test and staging: consolidation of similar environments
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Simplifying workload mobility
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Maintaining a legacy OS on new hardware
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Flexible, rapid provisioning
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Relieving scalability constraints of a given OS via multiple instances
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Fine-grained operating system modifications
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Configurable security characteristics
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1.1.6.1 General Workload Consolidation
The most common use of virtualization is the consolidation of multiple, often un-
related, workloads from multiple computers into one computer. This approach
avoids potential problems caused by mixing applications in the same VE. Once
it has been determined that it is safe to run a particular application in a specific
implementation of virtualization, there should be no need to verify a particular
instance of that application or a particular combination of application instances
for correct functionality.
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