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• Consolidate servers in the data center.
Servers running in the data center are often underutilized. One study showed that
data center CPU time averages about 12 percent of capacity. By consolidating
several physical servers as VMs running on a virtual machine server, data centers
are lowering hardware, maintenance, and electrical costs.
• Consolidate and host legacy applications.
• Isolate applications on the same physical server.
• Balance the computing load across data center resources.
• Provide application portability and flexibility across hardware platforms.
23.3 Terminology
The following clarifications can help you understand this document and virtualization
technology.
• The term virtual machine refers to an instance of virtual hardware environment
and the operating system that runs on that instance of virtual hardware. A virtual
machine could be running any type of software, such as server, client, or desktop.
It is often called a virtual computer, guest, domain U, domU, or unprivileged domain.
• The term virtual machine server or VM Server refers to a physical computer and
software that combines to host, create, and control virtual machines. It is sometimes
referred to as a host, domain 0, or privileged domain.
• The term virtual machine monitor (VMM) refers to the software layer that enables
SUSE Linux to host virtual machines. It is sometimes referred to as a hypervisor.
The VMM consists of software developed and maintained by the Xen open source
community. The VMM is extended for full hardware emulation with QEMU soft-
ware.
• The term VM-aware refers to an operating system that is optimized for the virtual
machine environment. It is often called a paravirtualized, Xen-enabled, modified
or optimized guest.
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Installation and Administration
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Troubleshooting
