Cloud vs Virtualisation

[SO16_Saint]

Having a discussion with some guys at work, and would appreciate some thoughts.

 

In laymans terms - what is the difference between Cloud and Virtualisation?

 

http://www.erpsoftwareblog.com/2010/08/the-difference-between-virtualization-and-cloud-computing/

 

have read the above link, but it's still not clear!

[Pancake]

Quite a bit if you want to get down to the nitty gritty, but at a high level we (the dept I work for) define the difference as being onsite or offsite. Onsite (virt) is our own system, housed in our data centre, scalable at a seconds notice for high profile systems and projects. Offsite (cloud) is a backend owned and hosted by someone else that we utilise as needs be, where data has been flagged as being allowed offsite.

[Turkish]

Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, with each virtual machine sharing the resources of that one physical computer or server across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. It's a great selling point as virtualisation reduces energy cost and TCO by around 60%, effectively paying for themselves in less than a year.

 

Cloud allows companies to store their data at an offsite location and access their data and applications via the web. Usually held offsite in a datacentre where they will rent rackspace from a third party for their information to be securely (supposedly) As pancake says the benfit is that rescourse is scalable and held offsite so reduces the cost and time of labour.

 

A not very interesting fact is that 70% of most companies IT budget is spent just keeping everything running with only 30% spent on innovation & developement which could have cost saving and increased performance of their networking. For further information on how to make your IT infrastructure more innovation and measureable cost savings feel free to drop me a PM.

[saint_stevo]

Cloud is the backend **** you don't have to worry about, it's hosted offsite and depending on your contract supported off site as well. For example, this site is hosted 'in the cloud' there isn't a server in Steve or Baj's living room, the hardware is hosted elsewhere and they have access in.

 

Virtualisation is as has been mentioned using one piece of hardware (ignoring clusters etc) to run multiple instances. In Virtualisation you have a Host (the OS on the actual hardware, be it VMWare, MS Server 2008 with Hyper-V etc) and then you have Guests (or VM's) that are running virtually on the Host. Depending on resources you could replace 100's of physical servers with a handful of Hosts