What is Virtualization?
Overview
Virtualization typically refers to the creation of virtual machines (VMs) that can emulate all of the hardware resources, including processors, memory, storage, and network connectivity. Moreover, it expands the capabilities of physical machines using a software or hardware known as hypervisor. Additionally, it is the cornerstone of cloud computing platforms.
It is a layer of abstraction that lets you extract more from physical resources to reduce costs, enhance agility, and boost resource recoverability. Additionally, it is a technique of partitioning or dividing the resources of a single server into multiple segregated execution environments. And each of these environments runs independently of the other, thus allowing multiple operating systems to run on the same hardware.
Types of Virtualization
This technology hides the physical characteristics of computing resources and makes users experience in VMs very similar to the physical machine. Furthermore, these VMs are software containers with OSs and applications deployed and running inside.
The following are some of the main types:
Full-virtualization: This is the emulation of hardware within a software platform. It is a technique used to provide a complete simulation of the underlying hardware. Moreover, it allows single physical computer to share its resources across a multitude of platforms.
Para-virtualization: This partially simulates the physical hardware of a machine. It is a technique that provides a software interfaces to VMs similar to that of the underlying computer hardware. Besides, as is the case with full virtualization, para-virtualization is not identical to the underlying hardware.
Hardware-Assisted: This is similar to full-virtualization. However, this type is mainly assisted by hardware and is not solely software based. In addition, it is an approach that enables efficient full-virtualization using hardware capabilities mainly from the host processors.
Goals of Virtualization
These environments and technology helps organizations achieve the following goals:
- Increase usage of hardware resources
- Reduce management and resource cost
- Isolation of an application from the operating system
- Improve business flexibility
- Improve security and reduce downtime
- Increasing the number of people that an application can support
Benefits of Virtualization
This technology helps organizations to create a software representation of the underlying hardware and enables you to run multiple virtual machines on top of a single host. By doing so, it may further have one or more of the following benefits:
- Better resources utilization and efficiency
- Cost savings
- High Availability
- Portability
- Easier and Centralized Management
- Server Consolidation
- Rapid Deployment
- Fault Isolation