What Is Virtualization?

As desktop and server processing capacity has consistently increased year after year, virtualization has proved to be a powerful technology to simplify software development and testing, to enable server consolidation, and to enhance datacenter agility and business continuity. Fully abstracting the operating systems and applications from the hardware and encapsulating them into portable virtual machines has enabled virtual infrastructure features simply not possible with hardware alone. For example, servers can now run in extremely fault-tolerant configurations on virtual infrastructure 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, with no downtime needed for backups or hardware maintenance. Virtualization is an architechture that allows you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer. Each copy of an operating system in installed on its own virtual machine. Virtualization is often confused with simulation and emulation. It is neither of these things. Simulation is something that looks like something else. A flight simulator is a well known example: it is a machine (or a computer program) that can make it look like you are flying a plane. Virtualization is not simulation. The real operating system is installed on the virtualized hardware. Emulations require software to translate commands for the emulated hardware commands the physical hardware can understand. This translation is slow and usually causes software packages to running inside an emulator to run slowly. Also, emulation packages can fail to translate correctly some of the machine language commands. Virtualization is not emulation. No command translations take place when you use VMware virtualization products.

How Does Virtualization Work?

The term virtualization broadly describes the separation of a service request from the underlying physical delivery of that service. With x86 computer virtualization, a virtualization layer is installed between the hardware and the operating system. This virtualization layer allows multiple operating system instances to run concurrently within virtual machines on a single computer, dynamically partitioning and sharing the available physical resources, such as CPU,storage, memory, and I/O devices. For industry standard x86 systems, virtualization approaches use either a hosted or a hypervisor architechture.

Host Operating System-Based Virtualization

Host operating system-based virtualization also called host-based virtualization installs and runs the virtualization layer as an application on top of an operating system and supports the broadest range of hardware configurations. For example, VMware Server is a free application that can be installed on a supported Windows or Linux system and that provides host-based virtualization. Once VMware server is installed, virtual machines can be created and employed.

Other VMware applications that employ a hosted architechture are VMware Player, ACE, and Workstation.

Virtualization Using a Bare-Metal Hypervisor

In contrast, a hypervisor (or, bare-metal) architechture installs the virtualization directly on clean x86based system. Because it has direct access to the hardware resources, rather that going through an operating system, a hypervisor is more efficient than a hosted architechture and delivers greater scalability, robustness, and performance. A hypervisor is a primary component of virtualization that enables basic computer system partitioning (that is, simple partitioning of CPU, memory, and I/O). VMware ESXTM/ESXi employs a hypervisor architechture or certified hardware for datacenter-class performance. For a very good Virtualization, see the white paper Understanding Full Virtualization, Paravitualization, and Hardware Assist at http://www.vmware.com/file/pdf/ VMware_paravitualization.pdf.

What Is a Virtual Machine?

From the users perspective, a virtual machine is a software platform that, like physical computer, runs an operating system and applications. An operating system that has been virtualized is called guest operating system. One supported guest operating system runs in each virtual machine that is created. Each virtual machine is completely independent and can have its own applications and its own security. From the perspective of the hypervisor, a virtual machine is a discrete set of files, including a confifuration file, virtual disk files, a NVRAM settings file, and a log file. Virtual machines are portable. They can easily be backed up or cloned. They are just an encapsulated set of files. Virtual machines will be discussed in deail in a later module.

Why Use Virtual Machines?

In a physical machine, the operating system (Windows, UNIX, Linux, and so forth) is installed directly on the hardware. This requires specific device drivers to support specific hardware. If the computer is upgraded with new hardware, new device drivers are required. Hardware upgrades also require direct hands-on contact by technical support personnel. Virtual machines are 100 percent software. The virtual machine is nothing more that a set of files. This includes files known as virtual disks, which replace hard disk storage. All the files for a single virtual machine are located in one directory. Because it uses standardized virtual device drivers, the hardware can be upgraded without any change to the virtual machine. Multiple virtual machines are isolated from one another. So now you can have your database server and your email server running on the same physical computer. The isolation between the virtual machines means that software-dependency and performing-turning conflicts are not a problem.

Because a virtual machine is just a set of files, it is simple to move the entire virtual machine to a new server to perform hardware upgrades.This also make disaster recovery and planning much easier.

vSphere Components
VMware vSphereTM consists of the following components: VMware ESX/ESXi The virtualization platform for vSphere VMware vCenterTM Server The central point for configuring, provisioning, and managing virtualized IT environments VMware vSphere Client An interface that allows users to connect remotely to vCenter Server or ESX/ESXi from any Windows PC VMware vSphere Web Access A Web interface that allows virtual machine management and access to remote consoles VMware vStorage VMFS A high-performance cluster file system for ESX/ESXi virtual machines VMware Virtual SMP A feature that enables a single virtual machine to use multiple physical processors simultaneously

vSpere also provides functionality for resources managementnsuch as VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), for availability such as VMware High Availability, and for data protetction such as VMware Cosolidated Backup and VMware Data Recovery.