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Virtualization technologies have gained renewed interested recently due to the
confluence of several phenomena.
1. Increased performance and computing capacity.
2. Underutilized hardware and software resources.
3. Lack of space
4. Greening initiatives.
5. Rise of administrative costs.
1. Increased performance and computing capacity.
The average end-user desktop PC is powerful enough to meet almost all the needs of
everyday computing, with extra capacity that is rarely used. Almost all these PCs have
resources enough to host a virtual machine manager and execute a virtual machine with
by far acceptable performance.
The same consideration applies to the high-end side of the PC market, where
supercomputers can provide immense compute power that can accommodate the
execution of hundreds or thousands of virtual machines.
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Underutilized hardware and software resources
Hardware and software underutilization is occurring due to
(1)increased performance and computing capacity
(2)the effect of limited or sporadic use of resources.
Using these resources for other purposes after hours could improve the
efficiency of the IT infrastructure.
Lack of space
The continuous need for additional capacity, whether storage or compute
power, makes data centers grow quickly.
This condition, along with hardware underutilization, has led to the diffusion
of a technique called server consolidation, 1 for which virtualization
technologies are fundamental.
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Greening initiatives
1. Recently, companies are increasingly looking for ways to reduce the amount of energy
they consume and to reduce their carbon footprint.
2. Data centers are one of the major power consumers; they contribute consistently to the
impact that a company has on the environment.
3. Maintaining a data center operation not only involves keeping servers on, but a great
deal of energy is also consumed in keeping them cool.
4. Infrastructures for cooling have a significant impact on the carbon footprint of a data
center. Hence, reducing the number of servers through server consolidation will
definitely reduce the impact of cooling and power consumption of a data center.
5. Virtualization technologies can provide an efficient way of consolidating servers
Rise of administrative costs
Computers—in particular, servers—do not operate all on their own, but they
require care and feeding from system administrators.
Common system administration tasks include hardware monitoring, defective
hardware replacement, server setup and updates, server resources
monitoring, and backups.
These are labor-intensive operations, and the higher the number of servers
that have to be managed, the higher the administrative costs.
Virtualization can help reduce the number of required servers for a given
workload, thus reducing the cost of the administrative personnel.
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Characteristics of virtualized environments
Characteristics of virtualized environments
There are three major components:
guest, host, and virtualization layer.
The guest represents the system component that interacts with the virtualization
layer rather than with the host, as would normally happen.
The host represents the original environment where the guest is supposed to be
managed.
The virtualization layer is responsible for recreating the same or a different
environment where the guest will operate.
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advantages have always been characteristics of virtualized
solutions
Increased security
Increased security
The ability to control the execution of a guest in a completely transparent manner
opens new possibilities for delivering a secure, controlled execution environment.
The virtual machine represents an emulated environment in which the guest is
executed.
All the operations of the guest are generally performed against the virtual machine
, which then translates and applies them to the host.
This level of indirection allows the virtual machine manager to control and filter the
activity of the guest, thus preventing some harmful operations from being
performed.
Resources exposed by the host can then be hidden or simply protected from the
guest.
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Managed execution
Virtualization allows the creation of a separate computing environments
within the same host. In this way it is possible to fully exploit the capabilities
of a powerful guest, which would otherwise be underutilized
A group of separate hosts can be tied together and represented to guests as a
single virtual host. This function is naturally implemented in middleware for
distributed computing, with a classical example represented by cluster
management software, which harnesses the physical resources of a
homogeneous group of machines and represents them as a single resource.