Virtualization is the "creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a server, a desktop, a storage device, an operating system or network resources".
In other words, virtualization creates a simulated or virtual, computing environment as opposed to a physical environment. Virtualization often includes computer-generated versions of hardware, operating systems, storage devices, and more. This allows organizations to partition a single physical computer or server into several virtual machines. Each virtual machine can then interact independently and run different operating systems or applications while sharing the resources of a single host machine.
By creating multiple resources from a single computer or server, virtualization improves scalability and workloads while resulting in the use of fewer overall servers, less energy consumption, and fewer infrastructure costs and maintenance. There are four main categories virtualization falls into.
Hardware Virtualization:
When the virtual machine software or virtual machine manager (VMM) is directly installed on the hardware system is known as hardware virtualization. The main job of the hypervisor is to control and monitor the processor, memory, and other hardware resources. After the virtualization of the hardware system, we can install different operating systems on it and run different applications on those OS.
Operating System Virtualization:
In operating system virtualization in Cloud Computing, the virtual machine software installs in the operating system of the host rather than directly on the hardware system.
The most important use of operating system virtualization is for testing the application on different platforms or operating systems. Here, the software is present in the hardware, which allows different applications to run.
Operating System Virtualization is mainly used for testing the applications on different platforms of OS.
Storage Virtualization:
Storage virtualization in Cloud Computing is nothing but the sharing of physical storage into multiple storage devices which further appears to be a single storage device. It can be also called a group of available storage devices that simply manages from a central console.
This virtualization provides numerous benefits such as easy backup, achieving, and recovery of the data.
This whole process requires very less time and works in an efficient manner. Storage virtualization in Cloud Computing does not show the actual complexity of the Storage Area Network (SAN). This virtualization is applicable to all levels of SAN.
Server Virtualization:
This is a kind of virtualization in which the masking of server resources takes place. Here, the central server (physical server) is divided into multiple different virtual servers by changing the identity number, and processors. So, each system can operate its operating systems in an isolated manner. Where each sub-sever knows the identity of the central server. It causes an increase in performance and reduces the operating cost by the deployment of main server resources into a sub-server resource. It’s beneficial in virtual migration, reduces energy consumption, reduces infrastructural cost, etc.
Conclusion:
Mainly Virtualization means, running multiple operating systems on a single machine but sharing all the hardware resources. And it helps us to provide a pool of IT resources so that we can share these IT resources in order to get benefits in the business.
Refer to the previous post, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS: more on cloud service models for different cloud deployment models
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