Hardware Virtualization A New Way to Deal With Legacy Applications
The time that every application in your data center was bound to a specific computer is fortunately gone. VMware virtualization technology fold many hardware systems into ‘virtual machines’ distributed over a few physical compute servers. The result : More efficient hardware use, less power, less floorspace, less impact of hardware failure, all contributing to significant savings. These are just some of the benefits of hardware virtualization.
This approach works perfectly on applications for computer systems that are based on a modern hardware architecture. But where does that leave your business critical legacy systems, those build by the former giants of computing like the DEC VAX and Alpha, the SUN Sparc workstation or the HP3000? The applications of those systems are coded and managed differently and will not run on modern hardware. They are so different that rewriting can take years and millions of dollars in a very labor-intensive process.
To the rescue comes a new technology called ‘cross-platform virtualization’. Without changing anything in the original software, it can make your legacy applications run as before on the modern virtual machines. It is a great way to postpone software migration costs, often forever. This new technology, a result of the incredible growth in compute power at an ever lower cost, can be explained as follows:
Program code for a computer can produce results in two ways. It can be put on a computer and executed. Or a person could could read each program instruction and execute it one at the time, looking up its function in a computer manual. In both cases the results will be the same (although it will take the person much longer). In the second case, the program is interpreted by an ‘operator’. A modern computer can be programmed with the contents of the manual of another type of computer to replace the work of the human operator, and therefore run the original program.