Now a days Virtualization is one of hot topic and it plays vital role in IT circles. In this post we’re going to tell you about Virtualization.

What is Virtualization?

In computing, Virtualization represents to the various methods of creating a virtual version of something.

Virtualization is transforming IT. Virtualization is more scalable and elastic model for delivering IT services. As a result, enterprises gain a more agile and efficient IT environment that is better able to respond to business needs.

Types Of Virtualization:

Hardware virtualization: Hardware virtualization refers to the computers or operating systems virtualization. It hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from users, instead showing another abstract computing platform.

Desktop Virtualization: Desktop virtualization is software technology that separates the desktop environment and associated application software from the physical client device that is used to access it.Desktop virtualization helps improve service quality and security and reduce costs.

Other types:Software,Memory,Data,Storage,Network.

Generally, Hardware Virtualization means the Virtualization of Computers or Operating Systems. In the process of Hardware Virtualization a Virtual Machine is created which provides a Virtual Environment to run other software or Operating systems. It hides the physical characteristics of a system from the end users and acts like a real computer system with an operating system. Programs run on those Virtual Machines are not related to the underlying hardware resources. For example, a Microsoft Windows system host a Virtual Machine to run Ubuntu Linux operating system, where Ubuntu based programs can be run without any extra Hardware requirements on the Virtual Machine.

Image Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_virtualization

Types of Hardware Virtualization

• Full virtualization:

A complete simulation of the underlying hardware to create a Virtual Machine environment which allows a user to run unmodified guest operating system. In Full Virtualization every feature of Hardware including the instruction set, input/output operations, memory access, interrupts and others elements that are used by the software be reflected into the virtual machines.  Full Virtualization is only possible with the right combination of hardware and software elements. In x86 platform the full virtualization is possible since 2005-2006 when two main processor manufacturer Intel and AMD add required supported into their processor lineup. For AMD platform it is called AMD-V and for Intel it is Intel VT-x extensions. Full Virtualization is quite useful for sharing a computer system among multiple users where different user can run their preferred operating system in the same hardware system, thus saves the cost to buy extra hardware or software.

• Partial virtualization:

Unlike Full Virtualization Partial Virtualization simulate few target environment and hardware features but not the actual and full simulation. It can’t run unmodified software and programs and need modification to run in the virtual environment. It was first used in the first generation time sharing system and was an important milestone to achieve full virtualization. Partial Virtualization is much easier than full virtualization which provides useful virtual machine to run important applications. It is highly useful to share computer resources among multiple users.

• Para virtualization:

In Para Virtualization the hardware environment is not simulated but offers a way to run guest operating system by providing a special API. Modifying the guest operating system is necessary to run into the virtual environment.

x86 virtualization:

x86 is a type of Hardware Virtualization that can be used to share a x86 processor resources for multiple operating system installation and usages simultaneously.

The two main processor distributors in market both Intel and AMD added hardware Virtualization support to their processors since mid-2000s, making virtualization for end user simpler and more accessible.

Desktop Virtualization often called the client virtualization is the process to separate the desktop environment and its associated application software form the physical machine. In this type of Virtualization the process virtualizes the desktop computers and stored on a remote server. The user interact with a Desktop Virtualization in the same way as a physical desktop but by logging in to the system remotely from distance. The advantages of this Virtualization is that the user can log in to the desktop from any location.

A popular method of desktop virtualization is Virtual Desktop infrastructure also called VDI. It is a desktop centric service uses the server computing model, to host desktop environment in a virtual machine (VM) from a remote server.

Operating System Virtualization:

Operating system Virtualization is the process to run multiple operation system images in a single computer system at the same time. It was first introduced in Mainframe Computer decades ago. This is done by splitting a computer into many different partitions called Virtual Environments (VEs), thus prevent applications from interfering with each other. OS level virtualization is a server virtualization method means it look and feel like a real server and allows multiple isolated user space instances.

Image Credit

Network virtualization is the process of combining the available hardware and software resources in a network a single virtual network. This idea is much like partitioning a hard drive into many drives, Network virtualization hides the true complexity of a network by separating into manageable parts and treats all services in the network as a single pool of resources.

Image Credit

There are many application available in the market to run virtual machine. Some of them are named below.

• VirtualBox:

VirtualBox is feature rich, free and cross platform supported in Windows, Mac and Linux virtual machine software.

• Parallels:

Parallels is not free and runs best in Mac computer system but also supports Windows and Linux.

• VMware:

VMware is the most popular virtual machine there is. It is highly customizable and feature rich. VMware Player is available for free for casual users.

In this post i’m going to talk about Virtualization in general computing.Below i’m briefly explains about virtual memory, virtual disk drives and ram disk.

Virtual Memory:

Virtual memory is feature of an operating system that reserve and uses computers Hard disk drives space as virtual memory along with the physical memory of a system. The purpose of Virtual memory is to store less accessed date and instruction by processor into hard drives, keeping the physical memory free for faster computer operation and when needed transfer these data and instructions to physical memory (in this case RAM). A typical today’s computer only has 2-4 gigabytes of RAM which is not enough to store all the data required by processor to process while the computer is running, so Virtual memory is very handy feature to speed up a computer.

Image Credit:http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/modules/vm/green/defn.html

Virtual memory is very popular because it provides a huge benefits to a user at a very low cost. By default windows operating system sets the swap area of virtual memory into 1.5 times the size of the Ram. It can be increased or decreased by user at any time. This feature in available in Windows operating system since Windows 95.

Virtual Disk Drives:

Gamers who play games in desktop are very familiar with Virtual disk drive applications like Daemon tools, Alcohol or Virtual Drives. The purpose of those applications is to simulate virtual CD or DVD rom drives of physical drive. The operating systems thinks the virtual drive as a physical drive and allows application that requires constant disk in drive check to run properly. This is done by creating a virtual image of physical disk first then mounting that virtual image file into the Virtual drive application. The recent version of windows, Windows 8 added virtual image mounting support.

Ram Disk:

Ram disk is a technique to create a virtual RAM disk drive by turning a portion of RAM into disk drive. In windows the RAM drive will appear as it is a fully functional disk storage drive, ready to store data. The advantage of creating and using a RAM drive is it is much faster than hard disk even faster than SSDs. A user can speed up Internet browsing, storing frequently used files much faster and other day to day disk activities by turning unused physical RAM into virtual RAM disk. There are many applications available to create and use RAM disk in windows platform. RAM disk by dataram is one of the popular of them.

Virtualization in Business is very useful tool to save cost and expenses by virtualizing required application and running them from single hardware platform. Therefor the business needs less systems to buy and maintain. Not only cost but a Business organization can also benefit in other way by Virtualization for example partitioning, workload management and other virtualization methods to distribute various computing resources into many users. It makes organization infrastructure vastly simpler and more efficient thus application deployed faster, performance improved, resulting in automated operations and the IT that’s cost effective easier to manage.

A new technique by company named Bromium which claim to kill all malware on desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, and even cloud based desktop computing using new virtualization approach. The technology is still in testing stage and they working on it to implement soon.

Future of Virtualization:

As the competition is ongoing between hypervisor vendors and IT companies virtualizing more workloads from their systems, it is easy assume that the future of virtualization is bright. But if we look deeply then we discover it’s not that obvious. The current situation of Virtualization is about compute and memory at the cluster level. The next step is to extend the benefits of virtualization so every domain of data center- storage, security, compute, availability and networking. The problem that most of IT organization faces today is the infrastructure is rigid and complex. It is not easy to deploy a new service or scale an existing one.  The future of virtualization is software-defined datacenter where infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the datacenter is automated by software resulting IT be more flexible, easy, and responsive to the business.