Characteristics of Virtualization
- Increased Security: The ability to control the execution of a guest program in a completely transparent manner opens new possibilities for delivering a secure, controlled execution environment. All the operations of the guest programs are generally performed against the virtual machine, which then translates and applies them to the host programs.
- Managed Execution: In particular, sharing, aggregation, emulation, and isolation are the most relevant features.
- Sharing: Virtualization allows the creation of a separate computing environment within the same host.
- Aggregation: It is possible to share physical resources among several guests, but virtualization also allows aggregation, which is the opposite process.
For more characteristics, you can refer to Characteristics of Virtualization.
Virtualization in Cloud Computing and Types
Virtualization is a technique of how to separate a service from the underlying physical delivery of that service. It is the process of creating a virtual version of something like computer hardware. It was initially developed during the mainframe era. It involves using specialized software to create a virtual or software-created version of a computing resource rather than the actual version of the same resource. With the help of Virtualization, multiple operating systems and applications can run on the same machine and its same hardware at the same time, increasing the utilization and flexibility of hardware.
In other words, one of the main cost-effective, hardware-reducing, and energy-saving techniques used by cloud providers is Virtualization. Virtualization allows sharing of a single physical instance of a resource or an application among multiple customers and organizations at one time. It does this by assigning a logical name to physical storage and providing a pointer to that physical resource on demand. The term virtualization is often synonymous with hardware virtualization, which plays a fundamental role in efficiently delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions for cloud computing. Moreover, virtualization technologies provide a virtual environment for not only executing applications but also for storage, memory, and networking.
Virtualization
- Host Machine: The machine on which the virtual machine is going to be built is known as Host Machine.
- Guest Machine: The virtual machine is referred to as a Guest Machine.