What is Virtualization?

Virtualization in Cloud Computing

Virtualization is a technique, which permits to share single physical instance of an application or resources among various organizations.

Virtualization is the designing of a virtual variant of something, like a server, a desktop, a storage device, an operating system or network resources".

Virtualization Concept

Designing a virtual machine over existing operating system and hardware is known as hardware virtualization. Virtual machine offers an environment that is logically separated from the underlying hardware. The machine on which the virtual machine is designed is called host machine and virtual machine is called guest machine. The virtual machine is managed by software which is referred as hypervisor.

Hypervisor:- Hypervisor is a low level program that acts as a virtual machine manager.

There are two types of Hypervisor

  1. Type 1 hypervisor
  2. Type 2 hypervisor
  • Type 1 hypervisor: - It executes on bare system (bare system are those system that is without a base operating system).

Example: lynxsecure, RTS, hypervisor, oracle VM, sun XVM server, virtuallogic VLX.

The type 1 hypervisor does not have any operating system because they are installed on a bare system.

  • Type 2 hypervisor:- It is a software interface that imitates the devices with which a system normally communicate.

Example: VMware fusion, oracle, virtual box, oracle VM for X86, solaries zoner, parallels and VMware workstation.

Types of Virtualization

  • Hardware virtualization
  • Operating system virtualization
  • Service virtualization
  • Storage virtualization

How does Virtualization work in Cloud Computing

Virtualization plays a crucial role in the cloud computing technology, basically in the cloud computing, users share the data process in the clouds like application, etc, but with the support of virtualization, users shares the infrastructure. The main usage of virtualization technology is to offer the applications with the standard versions to their cloud user. Let us assume, if the next version of the application is released, than the cloud provider has to offer the latest version to their cloud users and practically it is possible because it is more costly.

To solve this problem, basically we use virtualization technology with the help of virtualization, all servers and the software application which are needed by other cloud providers are maintained by the third party people, and the cloud providers have to pay the money on the monthly or annual basis.