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Department of Information TechnologyVirtualization: Comparison of Windowsand Linux
Chapter 1Concept of Virtualization
Virtualization provides a set of tools for increasing flexibility and lowering costs, things thatare important in every enterprise and Information Technology organization. Virtualizationsolutions are becoming increasingly available and rich in features.Since virtualization can provide significant benefits to your organization in multiple areas,you should be establishing pilots, developing expertise and putting virtualization technology towork now.In essence, virtualization increases flexibility by decoupling an operating system and theservices and applications supported by that system from a specific physical hardware platform.It allows the establishment of multiple virtual environments on a shared hardware platform.Organizations looking to innovate find that the ability to create new systems and serviceswithout installing additional hardware (and to quickly tear down those systems and serviceswhen they are no longer needed) can be a significant boost to innovation.Virtualization can also excel at supporting innovation through the use of virtualenvironments for training and learning. These services are ideal applications for virtualizationtechnology. A student can start course work with a known, standard system environment. Classwork can be isolated from the production network. Learners can establish unique softwareenvironments without demanding exclusive use of hardware resources.As the capabilities of virtual environments continue to grow, we’re likely to see increasinguse of virtualization to enable portable environments tailored to the needs of a specific user.These environments can be moved dynamically to an accessible or local processingenvironment, regardless of where the user is located. The user’s virtual environments can bestored on the network or carried on a portable memory device. A related concept is theAppliance Operating System, an application package oriented operating system designed to runin a virtual environment. The package approach can yield lower development and support costs
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Department of Information TechnologyVirtualization: Comparison of Windowsand Linux
as well as insuring the application runs in a known, secure environment. An ApplianceOperating System solution provides benefits to both application developers and the consumersof those applications.Virtualization can also be used to lower costs. One obvious benefit comes from theconsolidation of servers into a smaller set of more powerful hardware platforms running acollection of virtual environments. Not only can costs be reduced by reducing the amount of hardware and reducing the amount of unused capacity, but application performance can actually be improved since the virtual guests execute on more powerful hardware.Further benefits include the ability to add hardware capacity in a non-disruptive manner andto dynamically migrate workloads to available resources. Depending on the needs of your organization, it may be possible to create a virtual environment for disaster recovery.Introducing virtualization can significantly reduce the need to replicate identical hardwareenvironments and can also enable testing of disaster scenarios at lower cost. Virtualization provides an excellent solution for addressing peak or seasonal workloads.Cost savings from server consolidation can be compelling. If you aren’t exploitingvirtualization for this purpose, you should start a program now. As you gain experience withvirtualization, explore the benefits of workload balancing and virtualized disaster recoveryenvironments.Regardless of the specific needs of your enterprise, you should be investigatingvirtualization as part of your system and application portfolio as the technology is likely to become pervasive. We expect operating system vendors to include virtualization as a standardcomponent, hardware vendors to build virtual capabilities into their platforms, andvirtualization vendors to expand the scope of their offerings.Virtualization is unquestionably one of the hottest trends in information technology today. This isno accident. While a variety of technologies fall under the virtualization umbrella, all of them arechanging the IT world in significant ways.
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Department of Information TechnologyVirtualization: Comparison of Windowsand Linux
Virtualization is a key enabling technology that can be leveraged to achieve business benefits. Virtualization technology enables customers to run multiple operating systemsconcurrently on a single physical server, where each of the operating systems runs as a self-contained computer.Virtualization is a system or a method of dividing computer resources into multiple isolatedenvironments. It is possible to distinguish four types of such virtualization: emulation, Para-virtualization, operating system-level virtualization, and multi-server (cluster) virtualization.Each virtualization type has its pros and cons that condition its appropriate applications.Emulation makes it possible to run any non-modified operating system which supports the platform being emulated. Implementations in this category range from pure emulators (likeBochs) to solutions which let some code to be executed on the CPU natively, in order toincrease performance. The main disadvantages of emulation are low performance and lowdensity. 
Examples
: VMware products, QEmu, Bochs, Parallels.Para-virtualization is a technique to run multiple modified OSs on top of a thin layer called ahypervisor, or virtual machine monitor. Para-virtualization has better performance compared toemulation, but the disadvantage is that the “guest” OS needs to be modified. Examples: Xen,UML.Operating system-level virtualization enables multiple isolated execution environmentswithin a single operating system kernel. It has the best possible (i. e. close to native) performance and density, and features dynamic resource management. On the other hand, thistechnology does not allow running different kernels from different OSs at the same time.
Examples:
FreeBSD Jail, Solaris Zones/Containers, Linux-VServer, OpenVZ andVirtuozzo.Simply put, virtualization is an idea whose time has come. The term virtualization broadlydescribes the separation of a resource or request for a service from the underlying physicaldelivery of that service. With virtual memory, for example, computer software gains access tomore memory than is physically installed, via the background swapping of data to disk storage.
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