Virtualizing hardware with SDI
Virtualization popularized the concept of physical hardware (compute, network, and storage) being abstracted as software or SDI. This allowed businesses to improve resource utilization and flexibility while reducing provisioning time and costs. By decoupling hardware from the operating system, virtualization can provide access to abstracted resources through VMs. Refer to the description of VMs in Chapter 1.
The operations team uses a management console for configuring and provisioning the virtualized infrastructure requested by the development teams. Virtualization allows for policy-based infrastructure provisioning and automation. The management dashboard facilitates real-time monitoring of this SDI. The dashboard allows the VM’s CPU, memory, storage, network, and so on to be configured.
Figure 3.2 – VMware Fusion VM console for configuring CPU resources
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