Virtualisation meaning

In IT, outsourcing and cloud contracts, virtualisation describes the use of software (a hypervisor) to abstract physical computing resources—processing/CPU, memory, storage and networking—from the operating systems and applications, so that multiple isolated virtual machines (and, in some cases, containers) run on shared hardware and behave like physical equivalents. The term is descriptive rather than defined by UK or Irish legislation or case law, and its usage is broadly consistent across England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland. Key legal points: - Scope: applies to server, storage, network and application virtualisation, including on‑premises, private and public cloud (e.g. IaaS). - Software licensing: core/CPU and vCPU metrics, partitioning/cluster rules, cloning and snapshots can affect entitlement, audit rights and compliance exposure. - Data protection and security: multi‑tenancy, logical segregation, access controls, patching of hypervisors/guest OS, and logging should be addressed contractually. - Service levels and performance: capacity management, resource contention, and “noisy neighbour” risks impact SLAs and credits. - Portability, exit and business continuity/disaster recovery: rights to create, copy, migrate and retrieve images/snapshots, live migration and replication can affect data location/residency and exit assistance. - Responsibility matrix: clarify provider/customer responsibilities for configuration, updates, incident response and third‑party sub‑processors.