WHAT IS VIRTUALIZATION?

While virtualization technological know-how can be sourced returned to the 1960s, it wasn’t broadly adopted till the early 2000s. The applied sciences that enabled virtualization—like hypervisors—were developed many years in the past to supply a couple of customers simultaneous get entry to to computer systems that carried out batch processing.

As groups up to date their IT environments with less-expensive commodity servers, working systems, and purposes from a range of vendors, they have been certain to underused bodily hardware—each server should solely run 1 vendor-specific task. This is the place virtualization certainly took off.

It used to be the herbal answer to two problems

Organizations ought to partition their servers and run legacy apps on more than one running machine sorts and versions. Servers commenced being used greater successfully (or no longer at all), thereby lowering the charges related with purchase, set up, cooling, and maintenance. Virtualization’s huge applicability helped decrease dealer lock-in and made it the basis of cloud computing. It’s so conventional throughout organisations nowadays that specialised virtualization administration software program is frequently wished to assist maintain tune of it all.

How virtualization work

Software called hypervisors separate the physical resources from the virtual environments—the things that need those resources. Hypervisors can sit on top of an operating system (like on a laptop) or be installed directly onto hardware (like a server), which is how most enterprises virtualize. Hypervisors take your physical resources and divide them up so that virtual environments can use them.

?Types of Virtualization

There are 7 primary types of virtualization, and each one differs according to the element it is used on.

OS Virtualization

Virtual Machines Virtualizing an operating system environment is the most common form of virtualization. It involves putting a second instance or multiple instances of an operating system, like Windows, on a single machine. This empowers businesses to reduce the amount of physical hardware required to run their software by cutting down the number of actual machines. It saves companies cash on energy, cabling, hardware, rack space, and more, while still allowing them to run the same quantity of applications.

Application Server

Virtualization Application-server virtualization is another large presence in the virtualization space, and has been around since the inception of the concept. It is often referred to as ‘advanced load balancing,’ as it spreads applications across servers, and servers across applications. This enables IT departments to balance the workload of specific software in an agile way that doesn’t overload a specific server or underload a specific application in the event of a large project or change. In addition to load balancing it also allows for easier management of servers and applications, since you can manage them as a single instance. Additionally, it gives way to greater network security, as only one server is visible to the public while the rest are hidden behind a reverse proxy network security appliance.

Application Virtualization

Application virtualization is often confused with application-server virtualization. What it means is that applications operate on computers as if they reside naturally on the hard drive, but instead are running on a server. The ability to use RAM and CPU to run the programs while storing them centrally on a server, like through Microsoft Terminal Services and cloud-based software, improves how software security updates are pushed, and how software is rolled out.

Administrative Virtualization

Administrative virtualization is one of the least-known forms of virtualization, likely due to the fact that it’s primarily used in data centres. The concept of administration, or ‘management,’ virtualization means segmented admin roles through group and user policies. For example, certain groups may have access to read specific servers, infrastructure, application files, and rules, but not to change them.

Network Virtualization Network

Virtualization involves virtually managing IPs, switches, routers and is accomplished through tools like routing tables, NICs, switches, and VLAN tags.

Hardware Virtualization

Hardware virtualization is one of the rarer forms of virtualization, and when simply explained it is similar to OS virtualization (it is, in fact, often required for OS virtualization). Except, instead of putting multiple software instances on a single machine, chunks of a machine are partitioned off to perform specific tasks.

Storage Virtualization

Storage virtualization is an array of servers that are managed by a virtual storage system. The servers aren’t aware of exactly where their data is, and instead function more like worker bees in a hive.

Takeaways

Since containers are the hot topic today and people are taking great interest in serverless computing, server virtualization serves as a rock-solid technology that runs the vast majority of enterprise applications.

One can’t imagine an enterprise moving mission critical applications that run smoothly on VMs to either containers or a serverless platform. Users with multiple environments will use VMs as containers need to run all on the same OS and can’t be mixed between Linux and Windows.

In future, developers will make decisions based on the situation for running new workloads in a traditional VM, serverless environment or a container.

Thank you.