Virtualization

Abstract

With virtualization, a resource's consumers are provided with a virtual rather than physical version of that resource. This layer of indirection has helped address myriad problems, including efficiency, security, high availability, elasticity, fault containment, mobility, and scalability. This special issue of IEEE Internet Computing surveys some examples of virtualization enabling technologies such as workload migration and gaming consoles and introduces three articles on the subjects of language-level virtualization exploited to automatically parallelize applications; network virtualization used to enable tenant-specific network customization; and a virtualization layer employed above existing clouds to enable a multicloud grid. © 1997-2012 IEEE.