Physicalization of
computer hardware
Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random-access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, and computer case. It includes external devices ...
(the opposite of
virtualization
In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers.
Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...
), is a way to place multiple physical machines in a
rack unit
A rack unit (abbreviated U or RU) is a unit of measure defined as . It is most frequently used as a measurement of the overall height of 19-inch and 23-inch rack frames, as well as the height of equipment that mounts in these frames, whereby th ...
.
It can be a way to reduce hardware costs, since in some cases, server processors cost more per core than energy efficient laptop processors, which may make up for added cost of board level integration.
While
Moore's law
Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...
makes increasing integration less expensive, some jobs require much I/O bandwidth, which may be less expensive to provide using many less-integrated processors.
Applications and services that are I/O bound are likely to benefit from such physicalized environments. This ensures that each
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
instance is running on a processor that has its own network interface card, host bus and I/O sub-system unlike in the case of a multi-core servers where a single I/O sub-system is shared between all the cores / VMs.
See also
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Physical-to-Virtual
References
External links
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Cloud computing
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