Listen to Michael Schelin share information about virtualization, virtual pbx, shopping cart systems, fax to email, and colocation on DIDX podcast.

Schelin is with the ShellTel. I met him the Asterisk community in 2005. After the interview was completed, he explained more about cloud computing and virtualization for marketing types like me. A host operating system is just a container. Place the install disk which is an image of a system on a host. It becomes a file. You define how large the directory should be in virtualization.

The host is running. The virtual PBX thinks it is a traditional server. It talks to the host, and the host gives it what it needs. Each within its own world! The virtual PBXs share the resources like memory and hard drive space. The key advantage is saving money, but it's also a green technology in that it uses space more efficiently. 

VM ware might be seen as the grand daddy, but open source has made virtualization easy. It was first available around 4-5 years ago, but since then, hardware has caught up. For example, AMD includes instructions for virtualization. As of 2007, it has became quite popular. 

In the podcast interview, you can find out more and how to contact Michael Schelin. His team is expert in Asterisk.