State of the Art in Autonomic Computing and Virtualization

Virtualization is commonly defined as a technology that introduces a software abstraction layer between the hardware and the operating system and applications running on top of it. This abstraction layer is called Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) or hypervisor and basically hides the physical resources of the computing system from the Operating System (OS). Since the hardware resources are directly controlled by the VMM and not by the OS, it is possible to run multiple (Possibly Different) OSs in parallel on the same hardware. As a result, the hardware platform is partitioned into one or more logical units called Virtual Machines (VMs).