Using CA Service Virtualization › CA Service Virtualization › Introduction to Virtualization

Introduction to Virtualization

Virtualization usually refers to hardware virtualization, where the behavior of a physical asset, such as a server or application in a software emulator, is simulated and the emulator is hosted in a virtual environment. The virtual environment provides the same communication with the emulated asset as the physical environment.

Virtualization has the following advantages:

• Better manages physical assets, which eases change and configuration management
• Improves the utilization of physical capacity, which better leverages the capacity of the physical assets
• Improves agility, which avoids the costly delays that happen while waiting for IT to reconfigure or switch servers

CA Service Virtualization provides service virtualization. The process is in principle the same as that for hardware virtualization.