Context

Learn why virtualisation powers modern IT, improving efficiency and safely isolating environments.

Learn how companies have optimized these computer components to reduce costs and build flexible, scalable systems that power the modern internet through a concept known as virtualization.

Considered how expensive and inefficient it would be if every piece of software or every website required its own physical server?

Virtualization was created to solve exactly this problem.

Starting hypothesis

• Understand why managing applications on individual physical servers is inefficient.
• Learn how virtualization addresses hardware utilization and scalability challenges.
• Understand the components of a virtual machine.
• Learn how containers have further optimized hardware utilization for applications.

Method / Used Tools

Virtualization Overview

Before the emergence of virtualization, the dominant principle in IT infrastructure was simple: one server equals one application. Each physical machine was dedicated to a single role, such as hosting a web server, running a database, or managing email services. This model was straightforward, but it quickly revealed its limitations as infrastructures grew.

From Physical Servers to Virtualization

In the early model, one physical server was assigned to one service. If an organization needed to run multiple services, it had to purchase and maintain multiple physical machines. While this ensured clear separation between applications, it created several significant problems:

• High operational costs (hardware, electricity, cooling, maintenance)
• Very low resource utilization (often only 5–20% of CPU and RAM were actually used)
• Slow deployment times (days or weeks to provision new servers)
• Poor scalability (growth required purchasing new hardware)