Many IT people today think they have a pretty good idea about what virtualization is, and even know some of the companies that sell it.  But perhaps the people that are confused have a better grasp on the situation, because they know that they don’t quite understand it all.  And that can potentially prevent leaping in a direction that does not provide the results you thought it would.  To make it more challenging, many vendors are bringing completely different architectural models to market, so it’s hard to stack rank “feeds and speeds” since in many instances you are evaluating fundamentally different approaches to solving problems.  And these approaches have enormous short and long term implications to all of your infrastructure, some that are yet to be fully vetted.  Let me see if I can help reduce the confusion by explaining a few things about the various virtualization technologies.

Let’s start with the one that I...