A level of abstraction is created between a set of physical processors and a set of virtual multiprocessors to form a virtualized
data center. This virtualized
data center comprises a set of virtual, isolated systems separated by a boundary referred as a partition. Each of these systems appears as a unique, independent virtual multiprocessor computer capable of running a traditional
operating system and its applications. In one embodiment, the
system implements this multi-layered abstraction via a group of microkernels, each of which communicates with one or more peer
microkernel over a high-speed, low-latency interconnect and forms a distributed
virtual machine monitor. Functionally, a virtual
data center is provided, including the ability to take a collection of servers and execute a collection of business applications over a compute fabric comprising commodity processors coupled by an interconnect. Processor, memory and I / O are virtualized across this fabric, providing a single
system,
scalability and manageability. According to one embodiment, this
virtualization is transparent to the application, and therefore, applications may be scaled to increasing resource demands without modifying the application.