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From Physical Machines to Virtual Machines

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From Physical Machines to Virtual Machines
Anthony V. Lear
ITT Technical Institute

From Physical Machines to Virtual Machines For years businesses have depended on multiple pieces of hardware, linked together and deployed with software, to connect users to the resources they need. As technology has advanced with today’s virtual software programs, we can now run another “virtual computer” on a physical client machine. With all the technology advances some people believe that virtual machines are equal to physical machines. First, let’s get some background of the physical machine (server/client) and what it has to offer a network. There are many options when it comes to the CPU, Motherboard, Memory (RAM), etc. These options include hard drives (storage), video cards, audio cards, and central processing units (CPU’s). Even though “it’s all just computation” (Nikhil, 2011, p.38) the combination of hardware can make or break the performance of a physical machine. IT professionals have to consider the needs of a network when choosing a physical machine. Depending on how it will be utilized on the network this will then elaborate on the requirements of the machine to provide the capabilities needed to perform its role on the network. For instance, if you require a file server to allocate resources such as software, programs, employee documents, etc. you will have to consider the servers hardware needs to meet this demand. The most important considerations for a file server are storage, memory, and CPU. Storage capacity is always an issue with any physical machine, the more storage a machine can hold the better it can perform. The next consideration would be the CPU. Depending on the processor’s capabilities (number of cores, speed, and socket type) will impact how fast users can access the resources available to them. Memory is another important

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