Enterprise Software Data Center Best Practices: Learn about a stack of technologies that can help enterprises reduce data center costs, improve hardware utilization, and increase application availability and performance.

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In its most basic terms, virtualization is about abstracting computing resources from underlying hardware. As such, virtual machine technologies have emerged as a recent phenomenon that has become almost synonymous with virtualization, itself. But virtual machines are by no means the "be all and end all" of virtualization. Operating system virtualization schemes like Solaris Containers have a big role to play. From a broader perspective, grids offer the potential for widespread virtualized and shared architectures that can dramatically transform the way applications are developed and delivered.