What is Virtualization?
Virtualization is a word that probably you would’ve never heard. However, this concept dictates the way we interact with technology in present day. Virtualization is a very important building block for Cloud Computing. Basic idea about Virtualization is that we try to create a virtual form of a computer hardware or a computer resource. This computer resource can be storage, computing (server) , networking or even an operating system. In this article, we are going to be exploring concepts of Virtualization and we are also going to be studying Hypervisor, which is a basic part of Virtualization.
Basic Idea of Virtualization
In simplest form, we try to create a virtual version of computing resource like storage unit, server or an operating system. We use a software to replicate the hardware’s functionality to create a virtual system. For example: you’re managing a small company which requires a total of 8 servers to manage its total work load. There are two ways for you to implement these 8 servers in your office:
Firstly, you can run each of these servers on one individual computer. Thereby, you will be requiring a total space of 8 computers in your office. Not only that, you will have invest a total capital for purchasing these 8 devices, and have to pay to run and maintain these 8 computers.
Secondly, you could run 4 servers on one computer by the help of Virtualization. This would not only save the space in your office, but also save a lot of capital for company. Each of these emulated computer would termed as Virtual Machine (VM). These virtual machines are complete computer systems, which have their own components like processor, ports, memory etc.
What is Hypervisor?
Hypervisor is the virtualization software that is used in Virtualization and Cloud Hosting. This virtualization software is used to allocate and divide the resources on various pieces of hardware. This is used to emulate the underlying hardware. There are two types of Hypervisors:
Type1 (Native or Bare Metal Hypervisor)
- It directly runs on the host computer and it does not require any base server operating system.
- It has direct access to hardware resources.
- Examples of Type 1 hypervisors include VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor.
Type2 (Hosted Hypervisor)
- In this, a host operating system runs on the underlying host system.
- Basically a software is installed onto the operating system of the computing device. This software asks the operating system to make hardware calls.
- Example of Type 2 hypervisor include VMware Player or Parallels Desktop. Hosted hypervisors are often found on endpoints like PCs.
How Virtualization is being implemented?
Virtualization has been the cause of the cloud war that has erupted between Amazon with Amazon Web Services, Google with their Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft with their Azure.
By the means of VirtualBox, many people are able to operate Linux machines on their windows run devices and are able to launch servers on their own computers.
Virtualization has created a new concept of Snapshots by which we can save the sate of hardware of virtual machine and its storage devices at an exact point in time. This saved state can be restored later, effectively undoing any changes that occurred afterwards. Hence, very useful as an backup feature. For example: we launch the same state of our server with all the same settings and storage in case of failure of the server.
More concepts like Migration (Virtual Machine can be temporally stopped and resumed at a new host by the help of Snapshots) and Fail-over (Allows Virtual Machine to work even at an event of a failure) are helping in improving the overall efficiency of computing architectures of various of companies around the world.
