Over the last few decades, Virtualization has become a main topic of IT and it isn't exactly a secret that the it has changed the world. It is all around us these days. In today's IT industry you will hardly find someone who doesn't know about virtualization.
When you hear a term Virtualization, companies like VMware may comes to your mind. However Virtualization’s roots go back to the 1960s when it all started and was pioneered by companies like General Electric (GE) and International Business Machines (IBM).
In this short post we will discuss What is Virtualization?
By definition, Virtualization is the process of creating a virtual(software-based), representation of something, such as virtual applications, servers, storage and networks. It provides a layer of abstraction between computing,storage and networking hardware, and the applications running on it. This enables organization to run more than one application/operating system on a single server and make efficient use of hardware.
Any Virtualization that is managed by a program is called a Hypervisor. A Hypervisor is basically a piece of computer software that creates and runs virtual machines.
There are two types of Hypervisors available -
1. Type-1 native or bare-metal Hypervisors
2. Type-2 or hosted Hypervisors.
The Type-1 hypervisors provides direct interaction to the hardware without help of any operating system and hence are directly run on the host’s hardware (bare metal) to control the hardware and to manage guest operating systems. e.g. VMware ESXi,Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer,Oracle VM.
The Type-2 hypervisors requires an Operating System in order to interact with the hardware. Here Hypervisor is installed along with the OS. e.g. VMware Workstation, Fusion, Microsoft Virtual PC, Oracle VM VirtualBox.
Benefits of Virtualization
- Simplified data center management.
- Faster provisioning of applications.
- Reduced operating and capital costs.
- Increased IT productivity.
- Minimize downtime.
- Greater disaster recovery.
- High Availability and Scalability
- Reduced hardware expenditure.
So, what started decades back to make more efficient use of a mainframe computers has evolved into what is now, which has completely changed the IT world.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article. In our upcoming blog posts, we will delve deeper into advanced virtualization concepts, explore use cases, and shed light on emerging trends that shape the future of computing.
Thank you for reading!
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