Uses
Internet hosting service companies use hypervisors to provide virtual private servers. Amazon EC2, Liquid Web, Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform, Linode, SparkNode, and Rackspace Cloud use Xen as the VM hypervisor.
Virtual machine monitors (also known as hypervisors) also often operate on mainframes and large servers running IBM, HP, and other systems. Server virtualization can provide benefits such as:
- consolidation leading to increased utilization
- rapid provisioning
- dynamic fault tolerance against software failures (through rapid bootstrapping or rebooting)
- hardware fault tolerance (through migration of a virtual machine to different hardware)
- the ability to securely separate virtual operating systems
- the ability to support legacy software as well as new OS instances on the same computer
Xen's support for virtual machine live migration from one host to another allows workload balancing and the avoidance of downtime.
Virtualization also has benefits when working on development (including the development of operating systems): running the new system as a guest avoids the need to reboot the physical computer whenever a bug occurs. Sandboxed guest systems can also help in computer-security research, allowing study of the effects of some virus or worm without the possibility of compromising the host system.
Finally, hardware appliance vendors may decide to ship their appliance running several guest systems, so as to be able to execute various pieces of software that require different operating systems.
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