NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

Virtualisation is a group of technologies that offer a number of different options, either individual or working together, that break the traditional cycle of the IT function needing at least one server to run one application, with each application being considered a complete and separate entity in its own right.

As a technology, virtualisation has been around for some time, but it is only now that its potential impact on the development of IT systems and infrastructures can really start to be seen. It is a technology that has come out of the mainframe business of old, where several processors were available to be used either together for a specific task, or as individual processors capable of running different tasks. So it became possible to create 'virtual' systems of variable performance and capability that exploited the available IT resources as efficiently as possible.