Let’s suppose you have multiple operating systems and need to run a computer. How is this possible? Virtualization is required to achieve this.
We’ll start by discussing the basics of virtualization and the two types of hypervisors (type one and type two). Next, we’ll look at virtualized networking and how it works. Finally, we’ll talk about three different uses for virtualization in real life.
Virtualization can be described as a combination of a single physical machine and multiple virtual machines running within it. Virtual machines all use the same hardware, which means that we have one machine and many computers within it. This could include multiple types of Windows machines, or other types. They all use the same main machines, hardware. This is the essence of virtualization.
The system’s hardware is used and we allocate a certain amount to each virtual machine. This is CPU, RAM, memory, and storage. The amount of storage, RAM, and CPU that we use on our VMs must not exceed the hardware’s capabilities. It makes sense, right?
Here are some additional benefits:
Hardware Resources: Virtualization allows us to make better use of our hardware resources. For example, if we have two servers that are running specific services for our network, then they may only be using a third of their CPU, RAM, and storage. Virtualization allows us to put both the machines in one machine and have virtualization run on both machines. Because we have more services and servers, we are actually using more of the CPU, RAM and storage on this box. This allows us to make better use of our hardware resources, which in turn results in power savings and a smaller footprint. Because we don’t power as many machines, we have less power and a smaller footprint. This means that multiple pieces of hardware can be combined into one smaller piece.
Recovery: Our virtual machines can be saved as files. Our virtual machines exist as files. We can save them, back them up, and save them in multiple locations to recover.
Flexible: We can move our virtual machines between different data centers. It allows us to do many things that we couldn’t before with only hardware-based machines. We can use it to research operating systems and create sandboxes that allow us to test things without the need for a physical machine. We can simply spin up a virtual machine to do this. Then we can play around with it and test it.
Type One Hypervisors
We start with the type 1 hypervisor. This is where we install our virtualization layer. It is installed directly onto bare metal hardware such as a server. VMware ESXi, for example, can be loaded directly onto a server. We can then add different operating systems to the hypervisor. You could have a virtual machine running Windows, Linux, or another operating system. We could create a virtual machine with any operating system that we choose. This is a great way to see how things are layered. This will be very useful when we consider type two. Other types of type one hypervisors than VMware ESXi (now known as vSphere) are: Citrix Xenserver and Microsoft Hyper V are two examples of type one hypervisors. There are many more, but these three are the most important.
Let’s learn more about VMware vSphere. We install VMware vSphere on the hardware of the bare metal server. This is the first screen we see when we start it up. This screen allows us to configure our server and then it opens a command line interface. We can just type our commands. There isn’t much that we need to do from there. After the hypervisor is up and running, we can configure our virtualized environment. It can be accessed via a browser or a client. Here we are looking at the VMware web client, which can be accessed via a browser. After installing our type one hypervisor, this is what we can access. This is where we can set up all our virtual machines and servers, as well as configure our storage environment and network. This is our type one hypervisor, and it runs in most of our data centers.
Type Two Hypervisors
Type two hypervisors are quite different. You may have seen a type two hypervisor before. If you have VMware Fusion or Windows, you might have VMware Workstation. If you have a Mac, you may also have VMware Fusion. This software can be installed on your computer and you can then run virtual machines from that computer. This is type two hypervisors. They are installed on the host operating systems installed directly on a Windows, Linux, or Mac host. We then create our virtual machines. There are two other types of type 2 hypervisors: Oracle’s VirtualBox, then parallels. This is only for Macs. VirtualBox can be used on Linux, Macs, and Windows. Type two hypervisors are now installed on the host OS. Type one hypervisors can be installed on the bare-metal system.
Virtualized Networking
We can now move on to virtualized networking. In this example, a white dotted line represents a physical server. This physical server is equipped with four network interface cards