ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This Project has been made possible through the direct and indirect Co-operation of various
persons, who have inspired us at every step of our work. It is a matter of pride for us to
acknowledge our profound gratitude to our respected Prof. Somil Mishra who always facilitates
us in gaining practical knowledge.

We are very much obliged and thankful to our computer Lab assistants for their valuable
Cooperation in getting the hard copy of this Term Paper.

And above all, we are beholden to our Parents and other family members for their blessing and
encouragement in completing this task.

ANKITA GUPTA
ANUP SARAF
INDERPAL SINGH
MEENU GUPTA
 PREFACE

The Term Paper provides an opportunity to a student to demonstrate application of his/her

knowledge, skill and competencies required during the technical session. This Paper also helps
the student to devote his/her skill to analyze the problem to suggest alternative solutions, to
evaluate them and to provide feasible recommendations on the provided data.

The Term Paper is on the topic of “ VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE

MANAGEMENT”. Although we have tried our level best to prepare this report an error free
report every effort has been made to offer the most authenticate position with accuracy.
Introduction

Virtual management seeks to separate certain responsibilities of managers from the actual site of
production, the workers and resources at that site. It orients managers more directly to the needs
of a service economy - wherein "commodity" and "product" relations are no longer a source of
sustainable competitive advantage, due to global competition or inability to predict liability.

Its major advantage, according to supporters, is to focus on the customer and the value chain
from which the customer derives value. Its major drawback, according to detractors, is that
commodity and product relations "outsourced" to developing nations do tremendous harm.
Others see benefits, but note that it tends to specialize these nations, as under colonialism, when
they fed "natural resources" and "human resources" to developed nations, into narrow and
limited supply roles.

While seeking organisational effectiveness in the current capitalist mode of production,

especially profit-making organisations are increasingly recognising the competitive advantage of
concentrating on their core competences and outsourcing all or most of other operations. Another
economical driving force is the shift from traditional consumerism to relationship marketing and
Customer relationship management (CRM). Companies try to introduce products to potential
customers earlier in their life and then try to keep them as customers as long as possible. In
addition, companies may consult users for research and development purposes to increase
customer satisfaction.

These operations may also be more project-based, involving organisations that may or may not
formally belong to any of the units involved. All this creates new kinds of interlinked networks
of suppliers, buyers, producers and customers, where the factors of production are being acquired
as conveniently as possible to make deliverables that can be seamlessly supplied to the people
who need them, to where and when they need them.

These networks are called Virtual organizations. They may consist of any form and number of
people of individuals, teams, companies and / or stakeholders, managed from one clear point
with and organised long-term strategy or conjured up in an ad hoc style to solve a particular
problem with a few hours' time scale. People working in these organizations can be seen as
virtual workers, and leaders as virtual managers, depending on their involvement and location in
time and space.

Further, Virtual Management becomes easier in the current information-intensive work, as

information itself has becfome the new factor of production. Raw data can be conveniently
mined, processed and sold as information, which in turn can function as raw material or end
product for others, depending on the importance, accuracy and timeliness of that information.
Advanced Services, including insurance houses, financial institutions, advertising, real estate,
consulting, marketing, PR, security, management of information systems, and news and
entertainment publishers, are at the core of these operations. On the other hand, any company,
however traditional in its field of business, can be seen as virtual, if it is
  Spatially decentralised, having suppliers, managers, employees and customers in a large
geographical area
 Temporally dispersed, having the above also on several time zones
 Technologically harnessed, as it is the newest technology that has created the "explosion"
of virtually interlinked global players.

Due to this, employees in these companies may commute to their local workplaces every day, or
they may work distantly from one or several places, or they can be completely mobile, as some
sales representatives might do. All this creates an increasing need to communicate, through
technology, with customers and other employees that the employee might never meet. The
workers might also be members of virtual teams, consisting of experts in different countries,
some of them belonging to the physical organisation and some of them not, having an objective
to fulfil, for example a product concept development. The members of this team might meet
physically at some point, or they might never do it, depending on their virtual working skills and
availability of technology enabling sensible communication.

Where there are virtual organizations, there is also virtual management, which is thus about

 Managing organisations from a different place

 Managing organisations from a different time
 Managing something that is not part of your organisation
 Something that is almost like management, but not quite (when referring to the term
virtual reality) - or "more management than there actually is" (referring to the term virtual
memory).1
 Managing by using technology (because traditional management does not necessarily
require tech)
 Managing organisations by sending people out there physically to do it for you (referring
to colonialism, which the anti-globalization movement claims as a form of VM)
 Any combination of the above.

IT organizations are still grappling with the legacy of the IT explosion of the 1990s, which left
many of them with high costs, slow response times, and an inconsistently managed
infrastructure. Today, IT organizations that want to give their enterprise sustainable competitive
advantage need to:
• Drive cost out of their infrastructure through more efficient use of resources.
• Respond faster to business needs so projects get deployed more rapidly. Increase the
consistency and predictability of operations.
Virtual Infrastructure Implementation

Virtualization Value

Virtualization provides opportunities to improve service levels and low er capital and operating
costs to provide and maintain IT infrastructure. Over the past five years many organizations have
specifically deployed VM ware infrastructure software on industry standard systems to
significantly reduce their hardware, data center and operational coasts—many report 70-80%
costs savings and 3-6 month RO I periods—while achieving unexpected gains in operational
flexibility, efficiency, and agility. To date over one million server workloads have been
virtualized on this infrastructure. 90% of our customers are now rolling out this infrastructure
for production usage.

Key Success Factors

Based on the experiences of our customers, implementing virtual infrastructure is achievable and
manageable. However, because virtualization is still a relatively new technology that can touch a
broad set of IT stakeholders and processes, cultural resistance can stall or limit many
deployments, particularly in larger enterprise organization. To achieve the benefits of
virtualization beyond a tactical and isolated project-oriented deployment, we’ve found that the
following considerations and strategies help organizations address cultural and organizational
challenges.
 Top-down sponsorship ensures the appropriate levels of funding, staffing and cooperation
from all groups within the enterprise.
 Treat virtualization as an architectural decision that leads to a corporate IT standard and a
new model of delivering infrastructure resources.
 Design for the big picture and deploy incrementally to lower risk, build confidence and
achieve early RO I (target 6 months).
 Achieve and maintain stakeholder buy-in as the cultural changes required to roll out new
technology requires cross-department cooperation.
 Form a core virtualization team—a Center of Excellence—chartered to design, operate
and drive internal changes.
 Create high quality design utilizing best practices to minimize issues and establish
proficient ways for tracking and remediation.
 Refine virtualization processes with standard and measurable practices

 Start with an assessment of the “as is” organizational and technical readiness and design a
vision for a desired end state.
Key Changes within IT infrastructure

Rolling out virtualization can introduce change within the IT infrastructure and the organization
requiring, IT management to properly guide and sponsor the activities. A range of IT processes
and infrastructure designs are commonly affected by virtualization. Specific know ledge and skill
sets around virtualization need to be developed during the design, planning and first phase
deployment. IT processes around application, capacity and hardware provisioning is the most
fundamental area that requires re-engineering to achieve an implementation that scales across
multiple terms. In many cases, a straightforward evolution of current technical standards and
operational processes w ill achieve a smooth integration of virtual infrastructure into existing
practices.

Operational Readiness

Operational Readiness is defined as the maturity an enterprise must reach to achieve full benefit
from a virtual environment. As the number of virtual machines deployed and the scope of use
across the organization increases, the level of capability to manage critical processes determines
the maturity level. In order to scale and proliferate virtualization technology, processes and
operations must become more mature and robust.

Successful implementations require the expansion of virtual machines and critical processes to
be delicately balanced with the capabilities and maturity of the virtual environment. Without
measuring balanced progress along the Adoption Curve, an enterprise may either over-commit
(too many services on immature virtual infrastructure) or under-commit (not enough services on
mature virtual infrastructure). Each of these states can cause lengthy delays, or even failure, in
reaching the desired scalability and associated return on investment.

Path to Operational Readiness

Phase I: Assess

An Operational Readiness Assessment w ill establish the current state along the Virtualization
Adoption Curve and determine how w ell the IT infrastructure environment is understood and
documented. Create a detailed inventory and assess infrastructure assets per project including
applications, services, CPU s, drives, N ICs and RAM . Then measure performance, utilization
statistics and trends. Review current and planned projects for impact and identify candidate
projects for collaboration. In addition, a high level review of business applications infrastructure
is important input into planning migrations to a virtual environment.
Phase 2: Plan/Design

From the Operational Readiness Assessment a Roadmap clearly documents the operational
design and project plan for implementation of virtual infrastructure. The objective is to
understand the impact of virtualization on the IT organization and infrastructure in terms of
deployment, design, operations and support and then move to a virtual infrastructure where
workloads are distributed efficiently to maximize capacity utilization. Review by stakeholders
and cross-department buy-in helps overcome resistance to cultural changes. In addition, the
Roadmap defines requirements for the new environment (e.g. hardware, service levels,
monitoring and reporting).

Phase 3: Build

Successful execution of the Roadmap requires clear direction as to w hat must be done and w ho
can do it. Therefore, building virtual capacity has many dependencies on other teams such as
network, storage, design and support groups. Execution of test plans demonstrate that all the
virtualization success criteria have been met and that core features and fault tolerance work as
expected. Steps to building out a virtual environment include getting the necessary approvals,
scheduling needed resources, installing hardware, completing configurations and building the
virtual machines.

Phase 4: Manage

Operations guides and “run books” must be extended to include all production capabilities of
virtualization such as back up and restore, adding new files systems, patching/upgrading and
monitoring. Ongoing management and improvement may mean expanding into areas of
virtualization such as desktop or business continuity or going deeper into processes like service
desk integration or incident management.

Desired End State

There are m any options and directions that the roadmap to virtualization can take depending on
the unique needs of your organization. The suggested phased approach w ill enable you to
experience success and provide a solid foundation from which to expand. Regardless of the size
or solution area of a virtualization implementation, strive to reach the following set of objectives
as a means to measure progress toward a desired end state.
 Tested standard operating procedures
 Defined policies, such as change management and security
 Implemented roles and responsibilities across the enterprise—not just CoE
 Primed for virtual infrastructure proliferation and future services
 High availability across core, integration points with enterprise system s
 Standardized processes
 Accepted plan for next phase—virtualization of process,
  such as chargeback, disaster recovery or compliance

The decision to implement a virtual infrastructure within your enterprise is a smart one that will
provide numerous financial and operational benefits to your organization. This practical
implementation strategy provides a key milestone as you continue to grow the full value of a
virtualization environment.

VIRTUAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Virtual Project management concept is radically catching up in the context of globalization and
availability of effective communication channels. This paper gives an insight about the essential
qualities of a Virtual Team member and discusses the importance of communication in Virtual
Project Management. Effective methods to manage the virtual resources for better output and
conscious handling of Virtual uncertainties rising because of the nature of the teams is discussed
In detail along with some suggestions to satisfy the Virtual Customer. The paper briefly
discussed the aspects which are to be paid attention by an organization to make good virtual
teams. Team working dates back to the days when men came together for a common purpose.
Making a team function together and achieve the objectives set for it has always been a
challenge. While a lot has been written about teamwork, people have often focused on teams that
meet face- to -face. They have addressed issues related to selecting right members for better
teams, better human relations and better team management. There is however very little written
about virtual teams, the new but fast emerging way of working together. Generally virtual teams
are spread across different geographical locations and have a common purpose while each work
team focusing on their specific objective, Communicate with the support of technology, and
work across certain predefined boundaries. And the beautiful characters of virtual team are that
Members are together responsible for the results of the team while each member brings his share
of exclusive knowledge. Unlike the traditional teams here the virtual teams spend very less time
together and usually these teams are very small in size and some times it may be of a single man
army nature.

Rationale behind forming the Virtual teams

The present day nature of the IT Industry needs virtual teams as there is increase in Globalization
of organizations and there is a sharp growth of organizations because of wide spread culture of
inorganic growth. The IT industry is facing intense competition leading to the need for closer
collaboration within the organization. More interestingly there is a need for organizations to
work closer with suppliers and partners of the supply chain and there is a lot of customization of
software required at the user end or at the work place. Increasing trend towards outsourcing or
offshore development and the access to communication technology which is increasingly getting
cheaper like the Internet and satellite communication also makes the organizations to form
Virtual teams. The improvements in technology seem to have complimented the increasingly
competitive and demanding markets leading to more of virtual teams being formed.
Types of Virtual Teams

We can classify the virtual teams based on their nature and composition. They can be classified
depending on the kind of organization, the kind of time schedules, and kind of geographic
dispersion the teams work in. While there can be virtual teams spread across the globe but part of
the same organization, there can be teams that are of same geographic location but working in
varying time frames. Virtual teams however can be broadly classified as collaborative teams,
Support teams, Project teams, work teams, Decision Teams, service teams and Response teams.
While some of these teams may have clearly defined membership roles and leaders, many may
be formed due to the shared values goals and objectives of the members. Communication takes
on an added dimension of importance, as the kind of communication possible is always less than
what is possible when members meet face to face.

Advantage- Virtual Teams

As we mentioned earlier, IT organizations are increasingly becoming global and forming virtual
teams owing to their benefits. Virtual teams provide flexibility in terms of time and location.
Some of the major advantages of virtual teams are that

 It helps to spread best practices and processes across the organization.

 Working in virtual teams helps better interaction between different functions and
departments.
 Virtual teaming reduces the need for people to be present at a common location. Hence, it
saves a lot of time and money.
 The focus of virtual teams is more towards providing service than production. Service is
currently the faster growing area of business.
 Virtual teams provide the physically challenged people an opportunity to contribute
productively where normal working environments would not allow.
 They also reduce the need for large offices and parking spaces. This is even more
important as the cost of real estate is escalating at exponential rates the world over.
 If more and more people would work from home it would naturally result in lesser
pollution caused by transportation. With the baffling traffic jams and pollution working in
virtual teams is becoming popular.
Essential Qualities of a Virtual Team member

Virtual teams work across the barriers of time and place. Hence organizations can truly get the
best talent available in the world to work with it. Technology through email, video conferencing
and Internet phones has made this possible. However, for the virtual team to work effectively the
members are expected to posses certain qualities like self motivation, accountability, ability to
work in a team based on mile stones, flexible thinking and most importantly Trust the other team
members.

Self-Motivation: Working in a virtual team requires a lot of discipline from its members. They
have to be self-motivated.

Accountability: In a virtual team, each member should make himself personally responsible and
accountable.

Ability to work on Milestones: Generally, work of team members is interdependent and if one
of the members fails to deliver his part of the job in time it will affect the other team member’s
work too. In a normal working environment it is possible to closely monitor and control the work
of all team members. In virtual teams however, it will take some time before the team realizes
that it is falling behind schedule. Hence it is extremely essential for the team members to
complete the work on time.

Team work: In normal teams, face- to- face interaction is possible both at workplace and
outside. Hence, the ability of members to work as a team is enhanced due to better understanding
and communication. This is not so in virtual teams. Members in virtual teams need to put in extra
effort to understand and make them understood. Thus, team members should be able to clearly
communicate to each other the role expected from each of them. Such understanding can best
take place at the time of initiation of the virtual team. Before the team members can get to work
together, ideally they should spend some time with each other. This does not often happen.
Therefore, during such meetings the members should try to understand each other personally.
Socialization at this time is really crucial as this helps build trust. Since first impressions are
lasting impressions the members should be careful about what they say and communicate during
the initial interactions.

Flexible Approach: Once the team gets to work certain points need to be kept in mind by the
team members. First, even as the members are interacting with each other on issues related to
work, they may be having other pressing priorities. Hence, each member has to be flexible
enough to give room for the other to respond or get back on an issue, unless the matter is urgent.
Next, the members should frequently make appropriate checks to see how the working
relationship is and how the work is progressing. Third, most often in virtual teams that do not
interact with each other through video conferencing, the members are unable to envision their
counterparts. To a certain extent this hinders effective communication. It might help to place a
picture of the member in front, with whom the interaction is taking place.

Trust: One of the most important attributes for a virtual team to be successful is trust. Team
members should be able to trust each other with the work they do. Members also need to feel
secure that each member will be consistent and reliable in his work. One way to build trust while
working as virtual teams is indulging in a certain amount of socializing before getting on to the
work aspect. For instance, it is advisable that the members share some personal information with
each other in their emails. This not only builds trust but also a bond between the members. Also
it helps avoid monotony. Two aspects are noticed in virtual teams where there is trust. One that
team members are able to set clear-cut tasks for each other without hesitation. The other is that
team members display a significant amount of enthusiasm and willingness to take on more
responsibility in their interactions. As a result, the whole team has a very positive orientation.

Communication - A vital aspect of virtual teams

As mentioned before, communication is vital for virtual teams. This is because communication
here is a challenge. Communication in virtual team is always less effective when compared to
teams whose members are able to meet physically. Therefore, the leader of the virtual team
should take extra care to ensure proper communication among the members. He/She should lay
clear guidelines about who communicates with whom, when and how often. These guidelines
may have to be strictly followed and monitored to sustain communication among team members.
General types of communication issues that are noticed in day-to-day among virtual teams are

 Team members are not very sure about the tasks they are expected to accomplish and how
it fits in the entire scheme of the project.
 Often team members find themselves sending a request or seeking a clarification from
another team member but not receiving a response. This can be frustrating.

 Communication in virtual teams tends to be inadequate in contrast to face-to-face

communication. Hence, most often communication is either incomplete or misinterpreted.

For instance, a sarcastic message sent through an email may not be understood in its essence. To
solve this problem, members must be trained on maintaining proper communication within
virtual teams. Members who interact over the telephone need to have good speaking skills, and
should convey the message clearly. This is because they do not have the advantage of enforcing
their communication through their body language. Similarly, those interacting through email
should be able to put down their thoughts clearly in words. Team members should be mutually
agreed about meanings of certain terms or symbols. It will also help if all members are
constantly updated about the status of the overall project and its related aspects. This gives them
an overall picture of the project and their roles. Teams use the power of technology to clearly
communicate their schedules, availabilities and work deadlines. Thereby, the entire team clearly
views the progress and appropriately follows up on the work.
The virtual team members need to be good in their interpersonal skills. They also need to be
quick in adapting to their roles in the team. Failure to do so can lead to conflicts. In a virtual
team it is difficult to notice a problem arising. Though team members may sense something
going awry they may not be able to pinpoint the problem. Hence it takes more time to identify a
problem and rectify it in a virtual team than in a normal team. Therefore, the virtual team's leader
has to be alert to identify likely issues and take appropriate steps for rectification. The root cause
of the problems is often not due to lack of commitment or integrity of members. It is often due to
some communication-gap among members. While this aspect is true in any group of people it is
amplified in a virtual team, as there is no face -to -face interaction. To sort out issues members
may have to resort to better means of communication in the order of videoconference, telephone,
email, fax or letter. For the virtual team to succeed they have to develop and regularize
Communication that is deemed to be informal among normal groups.

Effective Management of Virtual Resources

For Better out put some of us may be thinking whether there is any difference in managing the
Virtual resources from managing the traditional resources. The Answer is both ‘YES’ and ‘NO’.
Many of the traditional principles like Money, Time and infrastructure to manage the traditional
resources carry over into managing the Virtual resources too. But there are some other important
factors to be managed in case of Virtual teams, like we have to manage Virtual Creativity, Virtual
Multitasking and attain Virtual Synergy. Once we manage these three factors it is sure that the
virtual team will be highly effective and gives a better out put.

Money: In case of Virtual Project it is slightly difficult to convince the financial department
about the worth of the investment. There will be resistance from the Finance department. but we
need to be prepared and make them to understand the importance of Audio and Video equipment
for an effective project execution. We have to make sure that the budget for these items is taken
care and also ensure that if needed the budget can be changed incase the team requires some
more equipment in due course of the project execution.
Time: We may wonder how the time is different for Virtual resources. It certainly is, because in
this case the virtual teams are not bound by traditional office hours. The virtual project manager
has to extremely cautious while managing the team’s time and he/she has to be aware of the time
differences and arrange a virtual meeting for effective results.

Virtual Creativity: It is extremely important to encourage the Virtual creativity of the team by
allowing the team members to think nonlinear and seek different solutions.

Virtual Multitasking: One major benefit of Virtual management is that the built in advantage of
multitasking but we need to be very careful to track all the tasks. There is multiple software
available in the market, which help us to track the tasks.

Virtual Synergy: Virtual synergy is no way different from that of the synergy in highly effective
traditional team. But the Virtual Project manager has to monitor that the synergy will not result in
Team stagnation or the team burnt out in the fast paced virtual environment. So once the virtual
resources are managed effectively it creates different strengths and opportunities comparative to
a traditional Project team.

Manage Virtual uncertainty

It is very important to plan for virtual uncertainty specially related to human resources, as it is a
reality that human factor does not follow a straight line. It is very important for a Virtual Project
manager to remain calm, as the emotional outburst will travel faster than logic.

Create Buffer Resources: As the human tendencies are very fluid it is very essential to create a
buffer pool of resources that can take on the role of the team member incase of any loss of the
original team member.

Share the options: It is very essential for the virtual team to share all the options for solving an
issue. It is up to the Virtual Project manager to ensure that the team discusses all the possible
solutions and come out with an optimum solution.

Create the contingency plan: In case of an unforeseen problem the virtual project manager has
to create the contingency plan immediately if already not created at the start of the project. It is
always advised to use an effective software package to make decision levels that represent
different scenarios. And finally it is very important that the virtual project manager has to trust
the ability of the team members to handle an unexpected or unplanned issue. In case of any
unforeseen event taking place, it is necessary to involve the customer at every stage.

Satisfy the virtual customer

The motive of the business is to make Profit and the mission of the business is to meet the need
of the customers. After all it is the primary job to satisfy the virtual customer with our service.
Incase of a virtual project there are some methods which need to be followed to satisfy the
virtual customer.

Know the customer: In a virtual environment the customer is miles away and it is not possible
to physically meet him but it is essential to use the technology and talk to customer and know
who he is. The familiarity will help the virtual team to understand him better.

Talk to the customer at every stage: The customer has to be informed at every stage of the
project. It will ensure that all change requests can be incorporated at the infant stage and avoid
surprises from the customer at the end.

Distinguish between the customer need and product design: The virtual team has to know the
need of the customer clearly and design a product, which suits his requirement.

Inform the customer about any variance: If we fore see any problem it is essential to inform
the customer and explain him about the variance and seek his approval.
Hide nothing from the customer: Customer has to be promptly informed about various stages
of the project and also about any critical issues involved in the execution. Transparent approach
will always keep the customer happy Striking a balance between the customer needs and the
virtual team’s ability to provide what the customer wants hold the key in keeping the customer
happy.

Making Successful Virtual Teams

To encourage and leverage the power of virtual teams organizations have to pay close attention
to certain important aspects like:

Management commitment: Management should be willing to absorb initial capital investment

required in terms of communication equipment, induction, training, establishing dash board &
discussion boards that are required to bring team members together.

Human resource policy: The HR policies of the organization should provide just reward
systems and promotions for those opting to work in virtual teams. They should be reasonable and
non discriminatory.

Training: The organization has to provide employees working in virtual teams training in
communication skills and technology tools appropriate for the job.

Culture: Organization working with the latest communications technology and having an
informal work culture can more easily adapt to working in virtual teams. Similarly an
organization that places due emphasis on communication, learning, teambuilding, and acceptance
of cultural, language and background diversity among its employees is more likely to succeed in
forming virtual teams.

Technological Compatibility: While implementing virtual teams, organizations should take care
of making the tools used among the team members compatible. The problems identified are
generally in the area of transmission and decoding.

Providing transparency among virtual team members: It is very important to make sure that
the virtual teams are aware of the other member’s work and roles. This type of transparency will
ensure the team members to work effectively.
Virtualization Trends, Options, and Adoption

Virtualization is rapidly becoming mainstream technology, while promoting the environmental

green campaign to reduce CO2 emissions related to usage of non-renewable fossil fuels (aka
low-carbon footprint). Virtualization is similar to “thin computing” whereby one system (like a
client workstation) is dependent on a central server for processing activities. The dizzying pace
of new virtualization solutions and competitor product offerings has created additional
complexities to be integrated into a supportable and effective arrangement.

The method behind virtual infrastructure computing is the separation of a resource or request for
a service from the underlying physical delivery of that service. This method transforms a
traditional IT infrastructure into abstract layers of simplified and consolidated operations. In this
way, end-users are unaware of the complexity and sophistication handled by various
virtualization components. The abstraction underlying virtual resources allows partitioning of
physical devices into logical pools of computing resources so IT managers have more
flexibility in handling constant changes in the datacenter.

Virtualization broadly describes the abstraction of computer resources, just as a computer’s

virtual memory allows it to access more total memory by swapping data to disk (memory which
is least recently used), virtual infrastructures offer special enhancements that allow similar
expansion that is non-disruptive and transparent to end users. This abstraction concept can be
applied to every IT infrastructure component such as storage, servers, networks, operating
systems and applications.

Platform virtualization separates a server’s operating system from the underlying physical
(server) resources. Server virtualization is considered an abstraction of its hardware and software
resources. Users connect to the virtual infrastructure’s centralized management interface through
a web browser or remote desktop software in order to access many virtualized systems being
processed in tandem on a group of physical servers. See Figure 1 below depicting the before and
after effects of virtualization.
Abstraction broadly relates to the process of “generalization,” meaning to simplify the
information content of a concept or observable phenomenon (i.e., reducing it to its most relevant
purpose). Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification, wherein formerly concrete details are left
ambiguous, vague, or undefined for the sake of efficiency. For example, effective communication
about things in the abstract requires an intuitive or common experience between the
communicator and recipient for mutual understanding. Someone who has never visited Paris,
might have difficulty relating to analogies about the prestigious atmosphere on the Champ-
Elysees.

Abstract thinking is also characterized by the ability to use concepts and make generalizations,
such as when common properties are shared by a variety of items. For example, many things can
be red. In human color psychology red is associated with heat, energy and blood, as well as
emotions like anger that stir the blood. In philosophical terminology, abstraction is the “thought
process” wherein “ideas” are distanced from “objects” Philosophy is the study of fundamental
problems concerning existence, truth, validity, or cause and effect based on complex
combinations of universal, critical and systematic approaches to reasoned argument.

When applied to computer science, abstraction is a mechanism to reduce and factor out details so
that one can focus on and separate a specific concept. It is used by computer scientists to
understand and solve problems, using a particular computer language to communicate their
solutions.

A central form in computing is the use of language abstraction, relying on artificial languages to
express specific aspects of a system. Computer languages can be processed with a computer, for
example, when programming languages based on machine language are converted to assembly
language (the lowest form of computer language). Like abstraction, virtualization is designed to
make convoluted processes more user-friendly.

Layers of Virtualization
There are many conceptual layers of virtualization which are available in datacenter
technologies:

Access virtualization – technology implemented in hardware or software allowing nearly any

device to access any application without either one knowing about each other. Examples would
be a many users sharing a single client system* or one user seeing multiple displays.

Application virtualization – technology allowing many applications to share a single operating

system. This approach offers less isolation and higher risk compared to hardware and software
partitioning. Examples would include the ability to restart a clustered application in case of
failure or if it is not meeting its service level.

Process virtualization – hides physical hardware from system services and operating systems,
allowing one device to appear to be many or many to appear to be a single computing resource
for the purpose of better scalability (growth) or availability (no downtime). Formal education is
being replaced with distance learning; shopping via electronic commerce, social networking sites
and virtual worlds are other forms of process virtualization.

Storage virtualization – technology that hides the physical location of the storage subsystem
allowing multiple server systems to share the same storage device while masking the view from
each attached server. RAID (redundant array of independent disks) divides and replicates data
among multiple hard disk drives, which are then allocated to a computer in the form of reliable
“logical disks” spanning all the physical disks.
Each server is able to see only the virtualized logical disks assigned via “LUN-masking” hiding
the other disks being accessed by different servers. Snapshots of storage are another level of
abstraction handled by the storage controller for parallel processing and seamless backup.

Network virtualization – technology that presents a different view of the network separate from
the physical view, allowing only specific internal or external systems to communicate.

Management of virtualized environments – technology makes it possible to combine, pool,

provision, partition and manage multiple physical systems as if they were a single or separate
computing resource.
In summary, virtualization can be implemented at many levels. You will recognize many of these
conceptual forms of virtualization in the following paragraphs as we explain how to distinguish
between different virtualization techniques and deployments.

References

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_management

 pdf:- Virtual Infrastructure Implementation

 http://www.qaiindia.com/Conferences/presentations/sudhakar-gurumurthy_keane.pdf

 http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=virtual++infrastructure+management&btnG=S
earch&meta=cr%3DcountryIN