Duality of virtualization: Simplification and complexity

Abstract

In recent years, virtualization has gained much in visibility and importance in the information technology (IT) industry. Many analyst reports, including IDC [1] and EMA [2], indicated ever increasing number of companies deployed virtualization to their production environments. There is also tremendous momentum from industrial vendors in creating new virtualization enablers along with their management functions. Some vendors engage in activities of standardizing common abstractions for various virtual entities at different virtualization layers.