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> What is Virtualization ?
Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating
system, a server, a storage device or network resources.
You probably know a little about virtualization if you have ever divided your hard drive into different
partitions. A partition is the logical division of a hard disk drive to create, in effect, two separate hard
drives.
Operating system virtualization is the use of software to allow a piece of hardware to run multiple
operating system images at the same time. The technology got its start on mainframes decades ago,
allowing administrators to avoid wasting expensive processing power.
In 2005, virtualization software was adopted faster than anyone imagined, including the experts. There
are three areas of IT where virtualization is making headroads, network virtualization, storage
virtualization and server virtualization.
>What are the benefits of virtualization ?
There are some well accepted and inherit benefits to using Virtualization. Here are some of them:
*Reduce the number of physical servers
*Reduce the infrastructure needed for your data center (power, cooling, battery backup, network switch
ports, KVM ports and space)
*Reduce administrative overhead because servers can be administered from a single console
*Ability to bring up new servers quickly (it could take days or weeks to put in a new physical server but it
could take just a few minutes to create a new virtual server from a template)
*Hardware Independence of virtual servers a virtual server can run on any host server, regardless of the
host hardware
*Because of hardware independence, you receive reduce your disaster recovery cost, complexity, and
recovery time
*A greener datacenter & server environment due to the consolidation
Overall, lower TCO of servers
>What is a Hypervisor ?
You can think of a Hypervisor as the kernel or the core of a virtualization platform. The Hypervisor is also
called the Virtual Machine Monitor. The Hypervisor has access to the physical host hardware.
Of the total amount of disk space taken for a virtualization platform (like Hyper-V or VMware ESX), the
Hypervisor is, by far, the smallest part. A Type 1 Hypervisor runs on the bare metal of the hardware.
Examples of a Type 1 Hypervisor are Hyper-V and ESX Server. A Type 2 Hypervisor is hosted by an
operating system. Examples of a Type 2 Hypervisor are VMware Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.
.
>What is ESX Server ?
ESX Server is VMwares flagship enterprise server virtualization platform. It comes in two versions ESX
Server and ESXi Server where the latter has no service console and is the thinnest version available.
ESX Server has many optional features like VMotion and VMHA (both discussed below) and some built-in
features like the VMFS file system. Most end users purchase VMware ESX Server with some set of
optional features in a package called VMware Infrastructure. ESX Server is managed by the VMware
Infrastructure Client. Its centralized management platform is called Virtual Center.
>What is Hyper-V ?
Codenamed "Viridian" but given the the formal name of Hyper-V, it is a hypervisor-based Windows Server
virtualization platform that is included as a role of Windows Server 2008. Hyper-V enables you to
consolidate workloads onto a single physical server using a broad range of services ranging from
resource-intensive services like Microsoft SQL Server to third-party applications that may run on previous
versions of Windows or Linux.