Getting started with the IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Hypervisor Edition
This guide introduces the IBM® WebSphere® Cast Iron® Hypervisor Edition (HVE) and provides an overview of virtualization technology. Virtualization refers to hardware virtualization where a virtual appliance runs in a virtual environment and is packaged with a guest operating system and optional application software.
Virtualization allows you to run several instances of an operating system on the same physical piece of hardware at the same time. Virtualization is accomplished through technology called hypervisor. A hypervisor allows many different simultaneously running operating systems to share the same set of physical resources (memory, CPU, disk and network) on one physical server. The physical machine on which the virtualization software runs is the host and virtual machines running on the host are guests.
Cast Iron products perform equally well in both the virtual and physical worlds. You can install the Cast Iron Operating System (CIOS) on a single virtual machine running one integration project or on multiple virtual machines running many projects to create a data center infrastructure. For information on creating virtual appliances with CIOS as the guest operating system, see Deploying an OVF template.