Unit-2 – Virtualization and Cloud Platforms

➢ Virtualization
Virtualization is technology that you can use to create virtual representations of servers, storage, networks,
and other physical machines. Virtualization is changing the mindset from physical to logical.

Fig. : Virtualization
• What virtualization means is creating more logical IT resources, called virtual systems, within one
physical system. That’s called system virtualization. It most commonly uses the hypervisor for managing the
resources for every virtual system. The hypervisor is a software that can virtualize the hardware resources.

➢ Benefits of Virtualization
• More flexible and efficient allocation of resources.
• Enhance development productivity.
• It lowers the cost of IT infrastructure.
• Remote access and rapid scalability.
• High availability and disaster recovery.
• Pay per use of the IT infrastructure on demand.
• Enables running multiple operating system.

➢ Types of Virtualization

1. Application Virtualization:
• Application virtualization helps a user to have a remote access of an application from a server.
• The server stores all personal information and other characteristics of the application but can still run on
a local workstation through internet.
• Example of this would be a user who needs to run two different versions of the same software.
• Technologies that use application virtualization are hosted applications and packaged applications.

2. Network Virtualization:
• The ability to run multiple virtual networks with each has a separate control and data plan.

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 • It co-exists together on top of one physical network.
• It can be managed by individual parties that potentially confidential to each other.
• Network virtualization provides a facility to create and provision virtual networks—logical switches,
routers, firewalls, load balancer, Virtual Private Network (VPN), and workload security within days or even
in weeks.

3. Desktop Virtualization:
• Desktop virtualization allows the users’ OS to be remotely stored on a server in the datacenter.
• It allows the user to access their desktop virtually, from any location by different machine.
• Users who need specific operating systems other than Windows Server will need to have a virtual
desktop.
• Main benefits of desktop virtualization are user mobility, portability, and easy management of software
installation, updates and patches.

4. Storage Virtualization:
• Storage virtualization is an array of servers that are managed by a virtual storagesystem.
• The servers aren’t aware of exactly where their data is stored, and instead function more likeworker
bees in a hive.
• It makes managing storage from multiple sources to be managed and utilized as a single repository.
• Storage virtualization software maintains smooth operations, consistent performance and a continuous
suite of advanced functions despite changes, break down and differences in the underlying equipment.
5. Server Virtualization:
• Server virtualization is the process of dividing a physical server into multiple unique and isolated virtual
servers by means of a software application. Each virtual server can run its own operating systems
independently.
➢ Types of Server virtualization:

1. Full Virtualization
2. Para Virtualization
➢ Full Virtualization
• Full Virtualization uses a hypervisor to directly communicate with the CPU and physical server. It provides the
best isolation and security mechanism to the virtual machines. There is two type of Full virtualizations in the
enterprise market.
1. Software assisted full virtualization
2. Hardware-assisted full virtualization

1. Software Assisted – Full Virtualization (BT – Binary Translation)

• It completely relies on binary translation to trap and virtualize the execution of sensitive, non-
virtualizable instructions sets. It emulates the hardware using the software instruction sets .Due
to binary translation, it often criticized for performance issue.
Example;
o VMware workstation (32Bit guests)
o Virtual PC
o VirtualBox (32-bit guests)
o VMware Server

2. Hardware-Assisted – Full Virtualization (VT)

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 • Hardware-assisted full virtualization eliminates the binary translation and it directly interrupts with
hardware using the virtualization technology which has been integrated on X86 processors since 2005
(Intel VT-x and AMD-V).Guest OS’s instructions might allow a virtual context execute privileged instructions
directly on the processor, even though it is virtualized.
• Examples;
o KVM
o Hyper-V
o Xen
• The following virtualization type of virtualization falls under hypervisor type 2 (Hosted).
o VMware Workstation (64-bit guests only )
o Virtual Box (64-bit guests only )
o VMware Server (Retired )

➢ Paravirtualization
• Paravirtualization works differently from the full virtualization. It doesn’t need to simulate the hardware for the
virtual machines. The hypervisor is installed on a physical server (host) and a guest OS is installed into the
environment. Virtual guests aware that it has been virtualized, unlike the full virtualization (where the guest
doesn’t know that it has been virtualized) to take advantage of the functions.
• In this virtualization method, guest source codes will be modified with sensitive information to
communicate with the host. Guest Operating systems require extensions to make API calls to
the hypervisor.In full virtualization, guests will issue a hardware calls but in paravirtualization,
guests will directly communicate with the host (hypervisor) using the drivers.
• Example;
o Xen
o IBM LPAR
o Oracle VM for SPARC (LDOM)
o Oracle VM for X86 (OVM)

Fig.:Full virtualization and para virtualization

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 ➢ Virtualization reference model :

Figure: Reference Model of Virtualization.

• Three major Components falls under this category in a virtualized environment:

1. Guest:
The guest represents the system component that interacts with the virtualization layer rather than with the
host, as would normally happen. Guests usually consist of one or more virtual disk files, and a VM definition
file. Virtual Machines are centrally managed by a host application that sees and manages each virtual
machine as a different application.
2. Host:
The host represents the original environment where the guest is supposed to be managed. Each guest
runs on the host using shared resources donated to it by the host. The operating system, works as the
host and manages the physical resource management, and the device support.
3. Virtualization layer:
The virtualization layer is responsible for recreating the same or a different environment where the guest
will operate. It is an additional abstraction layer between a network and storage hardware, computing, and
the application running on it. Usually it helps to run a single operating system per machine which can be
very inflexible compared to the usage of virtualization.

➢ Virtual cluster :
A physical cluster is a collection of servers (physical machines) interconnected by a physical network such as a LAN.
Virtual clusters are built with VMs installed at distributed servers from one or more physical clusters. The VMs in a
virtual cluster are interconnected logically by a virtual network across several physical networks. Figure 3.18
illustrates the concepts of virtual clusters and physical clusters. Each virtual cluster is formed with physical machines
or a VM hosted by multiple physical clusters. The virtual cluster boundaries are shown as distinct boundaries.

The provisioning of VMs to a virtual cluster is done dynamically to have the following interesting properties:

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• The virtual cluster nodes can be either physical or virtual machines. Multiple VMs running with different OSes
can be deployed on the same physical node.

• A VM runs with a guest OS, which is often different from the host OS, that manages the resources in the
physical machine, where the VM is implemented.

• The purpose of using VMs is to consolidate multiple functionalities on the same server. This will greatly
enhance server utilization and application flexibility.

Fig:Physical and virtual cluster

• VMs can be colonized (replicated) in multiple servers for the purpose of promoting distributed parallelism,
fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.

• The size (number of nodes) of a virtual cluster can grow or shrink dynamically, similar to the way an overlay
network varies in size in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network.

• The failure of any physical nodes may disable some VMs installed on the failing nodes. But the failure of VMs
will not pull down the host system.

➢ Virtual computing
• Virtual computing refers to the use of a remote computer from a local computer where the actual
computer user is located.
• For example, a user at a home computer could log in to a remote office computer (via the Internet or a
network) to perform job tasks.
• Once logged in via special software, the remote computer can be used as though it were at the user's
location, allowing the user to perform tasks via the keyboard, mouse, or other tools.

➢ Virtual Machine
• A virtual machine (VM) is an operating system (OS) or application environment that is installed on

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 software, which reproduces dedicated hardware. The end user has the same experience on a virtual
machine as they would have on dedicated hardware.

➢ Load Balancing
• In computing, load balancing improves the distribution of workloads across multiple computing
resources, such as computers, a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, or diskdrives.

Need of load balancing in cloud computing

(i) High Performing applications

o Cloud load balancing techniques, unlike their traditional on premise counterparts, are less expensive
and simple to implement. Enterprises can make their client applications work faster and deliver better
performances, that too at potentially lower costs.

(ii) Increased scalability

o Cloud balancing takes help of cloud’s scalability and agility to maintain website traffic. By using efficient
load balancers, you can easily match up the increased user traffic and distribute it among various
servers or network devices. It is especially important for ecommerce websites, who deals with
thousands of website visitors every second. During sale or other promotional offers they need such
effective load balancers to distribute workloads.

(iii) Ability to handle sudden traffic spikes

o A normally running University site can completely go down during any result declaration. This is
because too many requests can arrive at the same time. If they are using cloud load balancers, they do
not need to worry about such traffic surges. No matter how large the request is, it can be wisely
distributed among different servers for generating maximum results in less response time.

(iv) Business continuity with complete flexibility

o The basic objective of using a load balancer is to save or protect a website from sudden outages. When
the workload is distributed among various servers or network units, even if one node fails the burden
can be shifted to another active node.
o Thus, with increased redundancy, scalability and other features load balancing easily handles website
or application traffic.

➢ Hypervisors
• It is the part of the private cloud that manages the virtual machines, i.e. it is the part (program) that
enables multiple operating systems to share the same hardware.
• Each operating system could use all the hardware (processor, memory, etc.) if no other operating system
is on. That is the maximum hardware available to one operating system in the cloud.
• Nevertheless, the hypervisor is what controls and allocates what portion of hardware resources each
operating system should get, in order every one of them to get what they need and not to disrupt each
other.

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 ➢ There are two types of hypervisors

Fig. : Types of Hypervisors

• Type 1 hypervisor: hypervisors run directly on the system hardware – A “bare metal” embedded
hypervisor. Examples are:
1) VMware ESX and ESXi
2) Microsoft Hyper-V
3) Citrix XenServer
4) Oracle VM
• Type 2 hypervisor: hypervisors run on a host operating system that provides virtualization services, such
as I/O device support and memory management. Examples are:
1) VMware Workstation/Fusion/Player
2) Microsoft Virtual PC
3) Oracle VM VirtualBox
4) Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

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