Full Virtualization
- Hypervisor contains the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM)
- Guest OS unchanged, Host can be any kind of hardware
- Guest uses generic device drivers
Hardware Virtualization (a.k.a. Hardware Assisted)
- VMM moved to hardware
- Requires VT hardware
- Guest OS unchanged, uses generic device drivers
Paravirtualization
- Guest OS requires paravirtualized drivers
- Thin layer for hypervisor, guest has access to Host hardware
- Host any kind of hardware
in gernal we have two famous methods of Virtualizaiton : Hosted Virtualization ( installing the virtualization software VMM on a host server ie. Windows Server 2008 or Linux etc. Bare Metal Virtualization ( installing the virtualization software on physical machine directly which gives super performance eg. VMware vSphear) aka Hardware emulation Further we can classify the virtualization in three important categories Storage Virtualization: This is achieved by consolidating all the storage in a single location which makes the network admins to easily manage the storage resource. Network Virtualization This is accomplished by combining all the network bandwidth and then splitting it into channels for users. this allows the Administrator allow resources as and when they require. This allows each user to access all of the network resources, which can be files and folders on the computer, printers or hard drives etc. This streamlined approach makes the life of the network administrator much easier. Server Virtualization This is the most popular virtualization method used today to consolidate multiple virtual machines on a single high spec physical server, This will save processing power , space in DC and more importantly cost.
- Virtualization of old physical servers to a virtual server also known as P2V (Physical to Virtual)
- Setup new servers only on virtual infrastructure (unless there is a mandatory requirement of having a physical server )
Although there are a lot of products available in the market to achieve this the ones that are hugely popular is VMware and Hyper –V. both of the software does the job although there is always a big debate on which is better one. I have always been a big supporter of VMware products, with their new range of products complementing one and other. I will dig these two deeper on my next post … Thanks for reading.
Sources : VMware: https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware_paravirtualization.pdf
Dell: https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps3q05-20050191-Abels.pdf
Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/hyper-v-server/benefits.aspx]]>
