Virtualization and The Cloud has become the driving force behind all new technology solutions of the future.
The Cloud has hit the IT world by storm and with good reason. The benefits of implementing virtualization solutions are limitless. This technology allows for more efficient utilization of network server capacity, decreased rack space, simplified storage solutions, reduced energy costs, better use of corporate capital and it leaves a lighter carbon footprint on the environment. In other words: virtualization helps you save money, energy, and space. Not bad, right? Currently, Desktops, servers, applications can be virtualized. If your organization hasn’t yet implemented any virtualization technologies, it soon will.
Virtualization can be viewed as part of an overall trend in enterprise IT that includes autonomic computing, a scenario in which the IT environment will be able to manage itself based on perceived activity, and utility computing, in which computer processing power is seen as a utility that clients can pay for only as needed. The usual goal of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and overall hardware-resource utilization. With virtualization, several operating systems (OSs) can be run in parallel on a single CPU. This parallelism tends to reduce overhead costs and differs from multitasking, which involves running several programs on the same OS.
Hardware virtualization or platform virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual machine that acts like a real computer with an operating system. Software executed on these virtual machines is separated from the underlying hardware resources. For example, a computer that is running Microsoft Windows may host a virtual machine that looks like a computer with Ubuntu Linux operating system; Ubuntu-based software can be run on the virtual machine.
In hardware virtualization, the host machine is the actual machine on which the virtualization takes place, and the guest machine is the virtual machine. The words host and guest are used to distinguish the software that runs on the actual machine from the software that runs on the virtual machine. The software or firmware that creates a virtual machine on the host hardware is called a hypervisor or Virtual Machine Monitor.
Different types of hardware virtualization include:
- Full virtualization: Almost complete simulation of the actual hardware to allow software, which typically consists of a guest operating system, to run unmodified
- Partial virtualization: Some but not all of the target environment is simulated. Some guest programs, therefore, may need modifications to run in this virtual environment.
- Paravirtualization: A hardware environment is not simulated; however, the guest programs are executed in their own isolated domains, as if they are running on a separate system. Guest programs need to be specifically modified to run in this environment.
Hardware-assisted virtualization is a way of improving the efficiency of hardware virtualization. It involves employing specially-designed CPUs and hardware components that help improve the performance of a guest environment.
Hardware virtualization is not the same as hardware emulation: in hardware emulation, a piece of hardware imitates another, while in hardware virtualization, a hypervisor (a piece of software) imitates a particular piece of computer hardware or the whole computer altogether. Furthermore, a hypervisor is not the same as an emulator; both are computer programs that imitate hardware, but their domain of use in language differs.