Basic concepts of virtualization traffic news duiih

What is virtualization jand can help me?

Virtualization is a software technology that is rapidly changing information technology environment and radically transforming the way people use information systems.

The reduction of prices on hardware and the presence of increasingly affordable virtualization software products has democratized this technology which, well used, can put at our disposal more operating systems options, lower costs and more control sobe our structure.

Within the computing fabric of a business or personal level, servers can play an important role to centralize resources and using specific tools that increase productivity in any production, planning and communication processes.

In short, quickly, so virtualization which is a process by which you can create multiple independent operating systems running on the same machine. You can understand with this example:

Think of your computer. It has an operating system can be Windows, Linux, OS X or whatever. All computers have an operating system and it is nothing more than a program that controls its components, such as hard drives, DVD and other storage units, the plate of video, sound, etc. The operating system makes bridge between programs on your computer (Word, Excel, Photoshop, Internet Explorer, Thunderbird, etc.) and the components above, creating an environment where the designers of these programs do not have to worry about how a hard disk is organized or how to make images appear on your monitor through video board.

Now think of another program running on your operating system, a bit special, because it offers not the typical Office application or Internet service, but it is capable of creating an environment that is running other programs, as if it were an operating system. This is virtualization.

Virtualization is therefore the creation of a virtual environment where you can run other programs independently. These programmes will be the same that you normally run on your computer, but it will work, so to speak, in a replica of an operating system. Therefore, if we understand what is an operating system, you will be able to understand that virtualization is a program that provides support to install other operating systems on your machine, they will perform as encapsulated within this virtual environment.

Basic concepts of virtualization

With a virtualization software we can do that a server is divided into multiple 'virtual machines'. This means that a company can for example use only a server to use all of their applications, while using conventional servers would need to run these same applications at the same time on different servers. So we have a server or computer running as many.

With this software the creation of a virtual machine is something very fast, basically running a command. Therefore, if we need a new server so we have almost instantly, without going through the process of purchase, configuration, etc.

Also virtual machines are completely independent, among themselves and with the hypervisor. Therefore a failure in an application or in a virtual machine only affect that virtual machine. The rest of the virtual machines will continue to function normally.

Virtualization allows us to save many costs in products. Having fewer servers means less energy consumption, less cooling and less maintenance, not to mention the space saving in the business.

Virtualization allows us, among other things:

Host multiple servers on a single physical computer. This allows us to optimize the use of resources (CPU, memory, storage).
Simplify the completion of backups (backup) and its restoration. An entire virtual server can be a single file.
Easily migrate servers between different computers.
Increase security, using servers isolated for different tasks.

Although not everyone is aware of their possibilities, virtualization may solve many compatibility problems faced by users in migrating from systems for example Windows 7 to 8.

Virtualization as an alternative to test software in a secure manner.

For those who use Windows as the main operating system, you can install a program of virtualization such as VMWare or VirtualBox and have another Windows installation running within Windows. This installation, therefore, would be the space where to put to work thousands of programs without putting at risk our main system. In this way we maintain our quick PC without overloading the operating system.

Best of all, is that all virtualization programs have a feature called "Snapshot", that leaves us to capture an image of the State of the PC. So, for example, can we take a snapshot as soon as we finished installing all the essential software and if at some point this virtualized PC "dies" because of virus or something like? Simply return to this capture, and in 5 minutes, we will have our PC on this Virgin State, none of reinstallations of operating systems.

Types of virtualization

Then we'll discuss the most common techniques of virtualization and some of its implementations.

Hardware virtualization

This is the most complex type of virtualization for, It is emulated by virtual machines, hardware components. In this way the operating system does not run on real hardware but on the virtual.

The great advantage of this approach is that it can emulate different hardware (for example, x 86 SPARC) platforms. Its main disadvantage is the high cost of translation of each of the operations from the virtual machine to the machine real, being able to obtain a yield of 100 to 1000 times less.

Operating system-level virtualization

This is the other end of the virtualization. In this scheme is not virtualized hardware and runs a single instance of the operating system (kernel). The different belonging to each virtual server processes run isolated from the rest.

The advantage of this approach is the separation of user processes virtually no loss in performance, but to all virtual servers share the same kernel can not get the rest of the advantages of virtualization.

Basic concepts of virtualization

The paravirtualization is to run operating systems guests (virtualized system that resides on the host and that transfers your requests to the real system to attend the services offered) on another operating system that acts as a hypervisor (which is the physical computer). The guests have to communicate with the hypervisor for virtualization.

The advantages of this approach are a very good performance and the ability to run different operating systems as guests. In addition, all the advantages of virtualization set out above are obtained. Its disadvantage is that guest operating systems must be modified to operate in this scheme.

Full virtualization

Full virtualization is similar to the paravirtualization but does not require the guest operating systems to collaborate with the hypervisor. On platforms such as x 86, there are some drawbacks to achieve full virtualization, that are solved with the latest technologies proposed by AMD and Intel.

This method has the advantages of paravirtualization, with the addition that any modifications to the guests is not necessary. The only restriction is that the latter must support hardware architecture used.

We currently enjoy virtualization on almost any PC that does not have more than two years old, although it should be borne in mind that it's really demanding and need powerful processors, a large amount of RAM, and if possible, a large hard disk. With these principles the older computers and small netbooks are excluded.

As for the CPU, the most modern integrated instructions and specific techniques to improve, accelerate and optimize the performance of virtual machines.

Requirements for desktop virtualization:

 The most important thing to be able to run a virtual machine in our PC, is the processor and RAM.

At a minimum, an Intel Core 2. This, because Intel has given real effort to virtualization on these processors, and being two cores or more, virtualize is not really a problem, since the processor load is distributed among these nuclei, causing the virtualized machine to operate almost as if it were running natively.

At a minimum, 2 GB of Ram. Virtualizing a computer can do with 1 GB of Ram without any problems if we only open from time to time, but if we are going to be running it constantly, we must not forget that this virtual machine will need our PC RAM to work.

Basic concepts of virtualization
With respect to the software essentially is to install a hypervisor to create and run virtual to be payment or free of charge machines. In addition, must have the CD, the DVD or ISO image of the installation of the operating system that you want to deploy in the virtual machine.