What is Virtualization and how it act as a building block of cloud computing

Cloud computing is a trending word in Information technology field. With cloud,  customers can deploy servers, databases, and other resources with in minutes. Have you wounder how a cloud provider able to create an instance or server with in such a short time. We are going to discuss about this in this session.

Virtualization is the technology used by all cloud providers for creation and management of instances or servers.With virtualization servers can be created and destroyed with in seconds.

What is Virtualization?

Virtualization is the process of creating virtual instance of a computer system using the available physical resource.

Consider that we have a server having 100 GB ram  and 32 processors, instead of using all these resources in one physical machine we can create virtual machines and divide the resource to them so that they will act as separate machines. This allows us to create multiple servers and use them as per our requirement.So how can we divide the resource to the virtual machines? this is done using virtualization technology. Using a virtualization software we will be able to create and manage virtual instances in quick and efficient manner. We have several powerful virtualization softwares available in the market that allows us to create virtual machines

Hypervisors

Hypervisors are hardware or software components that use virtualization technology to create and manage virtual machines. We have probably heard about many hypervisor software products. To name some: Hyper-V from Microsoft, VMware, Virtual Box, etc. These programs use virtualization technology.These technology support many advanced features like backup, snapshots,cloning virtual machines, etc. Not only can we create virtual machines, but we can also create virtual resources like virtual NICs, Virtual hard disks, virtual RAM, and so on.

Hypervisors are of two types:

1. Type-1 Hypervisor

2. Type-2 Hypervisor

Type-1 Hypervisor

This is a hypervisor that runs directly on system hardware. It's an embedded hypervisor, not software that we install on top of an OS.

Note: Hypervisors cannot allocate virtual resources to virtual machines if the physical machines do not have adequate resources.

Different offerings for Type-1 Hypervisor

1, VMware ESX and ESXi : VMware is pioneering when it comes to virtualization. Their products are well suited for enterprises and provide great support to customers. VMware offers ESX and ESXi hypervisors, these are hypervisors that deploy directly on to a bare metal instance. VMware products are not free, and licensing is required for using them in production or in an organization

2. Hyper-V: This is a common hypervisor used in most organizations. Hyper-V is an offering from Microsoft, and it is a type-1 hypervisor. Many people  misunderstand Hyper-V as a type-2 hypervisor because Hyper-V usually comes as a feature in the Windows server OS. Actually, Hyper-V is not deployed on top of Windows; instead, Windows OS is deployed on top of Hyper-V.

These two are the most widely used type-1 hypervisors; there are a few others as well, like Citrix XenServer and Oracle VM.

Type-2 Hypervisors

This type of hypervisor is deployed on top of an Operating system and acts as an intermediary. They can create virtual space and allocate virtual resources by taking physical resources from the host machine.

Hypervisors cannot allocate virtual resources to virtual machines if the physical machines do not have adequate resources.

Different offerings for Type-2 Hypervisor

VMware workstation/player : This is a type-2 offering from VMware. They are generally intended for small to medium businesses or for personal use. There can be a free and licensed version of this.

Oracle Virtual Box: This is one of the most used hypervisors. They are mainly used for personal use and for small organizations. It is free and supports many platforms.

So far, we have discussed what virtualization is, the hypervisor, and how it assists in creating virtual resources. So now let's see how this technology became the building block of Cloud Computing.

Why virtualization is the  building block of cloud computing

All Cloud providers, be they AWS or Azure, use the same technology for the creation of virtual machines. When a user requests for creation of an EC2 instance (virtual server in AWS), behind the scenes, a hypervisor at the AWS data center is actually creating a virtual machine based on the resource requirement we specified. After the VM is created, it is displayed in the AWS console so that we can log in and use it. As a virtual machine, it can be removed just as easily as a normal file. When the user deletes a virtual machine or EC2, the back-end hypervisor just deletes all the resources associated with that VM and finally deletes the VM. It's as simple and quick as that.

Now you understand how virtualization acts as a building block of modern cloud infrastructure. This technology is now used everywhere, from personal use to enterprises. 

Conclusion

Cloud computing is a modern technology that is powerful and flexible, but virtualization is what helped cloud to become as successful as it is today.With the features of virtualization cloud providers can create and destroy infrastructure quickly and also support many awesome features such as backups,snapshots, and cloning.

About the Author

Aswin ks

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