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CLOUD COMPUTING

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What is cloud computing, in simple terms?
Cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing services -- from applications to storage and
processing power -- typically over the internet and on a pay-as-you-go basis.

How does cloud computing work?

Rather than owning their own computing infrastructure or data centers, companies can rent access to
anything from applications to storage from a cloud service provider.

One benefit of using cloud computing services is that firms can avoid the upfront cost and complexity of
owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, and instead simply pay for what they use, when they
use it.

In turn, providers of cloud computing services can benefit from significant economies of scale by delivering
the same services to a wide range of customers.

What cloud computing services are available?

Cloud computing services cover a vast range of options now, from the basics of storage, networking, and
processing power through to natural language processing and artificial intelligence as well as standard
office applications. Pretty much any service that doesn't require you to be physically close to the computer
hardware that you are using can now be delivered via the cloud.

What are examples of cloud computing?

Cloud computing underpins a vast number of services. That includes consumer services like Gmail or the
cloud back-up of the photos on your smartphone, though to the services which allow large enterprises to
host all their data and run all of their applications in the cloud. Netflix relies on cloud computing services
to run its video streaming service and its other business systems too, and have a number of other
organisations.

Cloud computing is becoming the default option for many apps: software vendors are increasingly offering
their applications as services over the internet rather than standalone products as they try to switch to a
subscription model. However, there is a potential downside to cloud computing, in that it can also
introduce new costs and new risks for companies using it.

Why is it called cloud computing?

A fundamental concept behind cloud computing is that the location of the service, and many of the details
such as the hardware or operating system on which it is running, are largely irrelevant to the user. It's
with this in mind that the metaphor of the cloud was borrowed from old telecoms network schematics,
in which the public telephone network (and later the internet) was often represented as a cloud to denote
that the just didn't matter -- it was just a cloud of stuff. This is an over-simplification of course; for many
customers location of their services and data remains a key issue.
What is the history of cloud computing?
Cloud computing as a term has been around since the early 2000s, but the concept of computing-as-a-
service has been around for much, much longer -- as far back as the 1960s, when computer bureaus would
allow companies to rent time on a mainframe, rather than have to buy one themselves.

These 'time-sharing' services were largely overtaken by the rise of the PC which made owning a computer
much more affordable, and then in turn by the rise of corporate data centers where companies would
store vast amounts of data.

But the concept of renting access to computing power has resurfaced again and again -- in the application
service providers, utility computing, and grid computing of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This was
followed by cloud computing, which really took hold with the emergence of software as a service and
hyper scale cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services.

How important is the cloud?

Building the infrastructure to support cloud computing now accounts for more than a third of all IT
spending worldwide, according to research from IDC. Meanwhile spending on traditional, in-house IT
continues to slide as computing workloads continue to move to the cloud, whether that is public cloud
services offered by vendors or private clouds built by enterprises themselves.

451 Research predicts that around one-third of enterprise IT spending will be on hosting and cloud
services this year "indicating a growing reliance on external sources of infrastructure, application,
management and security services". Analyst Gartner predicts that half of global enterprises using the
cloud now will have gone all-in on it by 2021.

According to Gartner, global spending on cloud services will reach $260bn this year up from $219.6bn. It's
also growing at a faster rate than the analysts expected. But it's not entirely clear how much of that
demand is coming from businesses that actually want to move to the cloud and how much is being created
by vendors who now only offer cloud versions of their products (often because they are keen to move to
away from selling one-off licences to selling potentially more lucrative and predictable cloud
subscriptions).

Reference website: https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-cloud-computing-everything-you-need-to-

know-about-the-cloud/

What is a Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine app creates a virtualized environment—called, simply enough, a virtual machine—that
behaves like a separate computer system, complete with virtual hardware devices. The VM runs as a
process in a window on your current operating system. You can boot an operating system installer disc
(or live CD) inside the virtual machine, and the operating system will be “tricked” into thinking it’s running
on a real computer. It will install and run just as it would on a real, physical machine. Whenever you want
to use the operating system, you can open the virtual machine program and use it in a window on your
current desktop.

In the VM world, the operating system actually running on your computer is called the host and any
operating systems running inside VMs are called guests. It helps keep things from getting too confusing.

In a particular VM, the guest OS is stored on a virtual hard drive—a big, multi-gigabyte file stored on your
real hard drive. The VM app presents this file the guest OS as a real hard drive. This means you won’t have
to mess around with partitioning or doing anything else complicated with your real hard drive.

Virtualization does add some overhead, so don’t expect them to be as fast as if you had installed the
operating system on real hardware. Demanding games or other apps that require serious graphics and
CPU power don’t really do so well, so virtual machines aren’t the ideal way to play Windows PC games on
Linux or Mac OS X—at least, not unless those games are much older or aren’t graphically demanding.

Reference website: https://www.howtogeek.com/196060/beginner-geek-how-to-create-and-use-

virtual-machines/

How to create a virtual machine using VMware Workstation:

Launch VMware Workstation.

Click New Virtual Machine.

Select the type of virtual machine you want to create and click Next:

Note: Your choice depends partially on the hardware version you want your virtual machine to have. For
more information, see Virtual machine hardware versions (1003746).

Custom: This gives you an option to create a virtual machine and choose its hardware compatibility. You
can choose from Workstation 16.x, Workstation 15.x, Workstation 14.x .

Typical: This creates a virtual machine which has the same hardware version as the version of Workstation
you are using. If you are using Workstation 16.x, it creates a virtual machine with hardware version 16. If
you are using Workstation 15.x a virtual machine with hardware version 15 is created.

Click Next.

Select your guest operating system (OS), then click Next. You can install the OS using:

An installer disc (CD/DVD)

An installer disc image file (ISO)

Click Next.

Enter your Product Key.

Create a user name and password.

Click Next.

Enter a virtual machine name and specify a location for virtual machine files to be saved, click Next.

Establish the virtual machine's disk size, select whether to store the virtual disk as a single file or split the
virtual disk into 2GB files, click Next.

Verify the other configuration settings for your virtual machine:

Memory – change the amount of memory allocated to the virtual machine.

Processors – change the number of processors, number of cores per processor, and the virtualization
engine.

CD / DVD – with advanced settings where you can choose between SCSI, IDE.

Network adapter – configure it to bridge, NAT, or Host-only mode, or customize where you can choose
between 0 to 9 adapters.

USB Controller.

Sound card.

Display – enable 3D graphics.

Click Finish.

When the virtual machine is powered on, the VMware Tools installation starts. You are prompted to
restart your virtual machine once the Tools installation completes.

Reference website: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1018415

How to back up a virtual machine

Information

Parallels Desktop virtual machines are very similar to real computers, therefore they are vulnerable to the
same threats as real computers: hard disk corruption, data loss, power outage. We recommend creating
virtual machine backups on a regular basis to keep your work and data safe.

Note: Our general recommendation for any backup method is to keep the virtual machine Shut Down
during this process.

When should I backup my virtual machine?

We strongly recommend backup your virtual machine before performing the following operations:

Compressing virtual hard disk

Expanding / resizing virtual hard disk

Reinstalling / upgrading macOS

Upgrading Windows (guest OS)

In all other situations, it is recommended to backup virtual machine once in few months depending on
the amount of changes done to the system.

What are backup options?

Manual backup

You may simply back up the entire virtual machine by copying its .pvm file (it contains the whole virtual
machine) to another place on your Mac HD or to an external disk (recommended).

If you run your virtual machine from the external drive, the backup of the virtual machine should be put
to a different external hard drive.

To find your virtual machine's pvm file, follow these instructions :How do I find my virtual machine on
Mac?

3rd-party solution

You may also use a preferred third party backup utility like Acronis True Image, Carbonite, etc.

How to protect Guest OS from corruption?

A snapshot is a saved state of the guest OS. It's useful to create snapshots, for example, before:

You are going to run some programs that may damage the guest OS

You are going to configure some guest OS software that requires a lot of settings and changes

You want to mark milestones in the development process

Additional information

Snapshots cannot be created for Windows virtual machines that use the Boot Camp partition

If your virtual machine has one or more snapshots, you can neither compress nor resize the virtual hard
disk

Creating a snapshot increases the size of the virtual machine .pvm bundle

If you have a snapshot, you can revert to a state of the virtual machine saved in there at any time.

Reference website: https://kb.parallels.com/4859

Best practices when backing up a VMware Workstation virtual machine
(2006202)

Purpose

This article describes:

Best practices for backing up a VMware Workstation virtual machine.

Issues to consider when backing up a VMware Workstation virtual machine.

Steps to back up a VMware Workstation virtual machine.

Resolution

To back up the virtual machine (which includes the operating system, application files, settings, and user
data), you need to make a copy of the folder in which the virtual machine is stored. Ensure that the virtual
machine is not running or suspended while you are backing up the virtual machine.

To back up the virtual machine:

Ensure your virtual machine is in a powered off state.

Locate the virtual machine folder. For more information, see Locating a hosted virtual machine's files
(1003880)

Right-click the virtual machine folder and click Copy.

Navigate to the folder in which you want to store the backup, right-click anywhere within the folder, and
click Paste.

Note: Replace the backup virtual machine on a regular basis using the process described above.

You can:

Choose to move the backed up virtual machine to an external storage device, such as a flash drive or USB
hard drive.

Create a copy of the virtual machine on your desktop, then copy it to DVD or Blu ray disk.

Keep the snapshots of the virtual machine.

Note: Before beginning the back up, you can commit the snapshots to save storage space.

Related Information

If you are using the growable type virtual disk (VMDK), you might want to shrink the virtual disk using the
Shrink Disk option in VMware Tools. The Shrink Disk option allows you to modify a VMDK. by zeroing out
blocks within the guest operating system, thereby overwriting previously allocated (but deleted) data with
zeros.

To shrink the VMDK:

Open the VMware Tools Control Panel.

In Windows, double-click the VMware Tools icon in the system tray, or go to Start > Control Panel >
VMware Tools.

In Linux, open a command prompt and run this command:

vmware-toolbox

Note: For more information, see Opening a command or shell prompt (1003892).

Note: In Workstation 9.x, shrinking is automatically done while Cleaning up the disk. Therefore, this option
is removed from VMware Tools Panel. Go to VM > Manage > Clean up Disks

Click the Shrink tab.

Ensure that your boot drive is selected, click Prepare to Shrink, and follow the prompts.

Reference website: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2006202

Ways to Connect Your Business (remote office) to the Cloud

Understanding the ways to connect to the cloud, and how each will impact your business are important
considerations before moving to the cloud. Each business differs in how quickly it needs to access data,
privacy requirements, cost, as well as user interface customization. And, each of the three ways outlined
serves each of these needs differently.

VPN

With Virtual Private Network or VPN, your computer accesses a server through the internet, using an
encrypted connection. This secure connection can be thought of as a tunnel between your computer and
a server operated by the VPN service in a remote destination.

The benefits of using a VPN include the fact that your internet connection is completely secure because it
is encrypted, end to end. No prying eyes can access the network. Additionally, connectivity is possible on
most mobile devices, and the ability to control user access to the network is high.

Downsides of a VPN connection are that because of the data encryption and security, data speed is slow.
Additionally, increased network complexity means that it is more expensive to fix and update the

network and specialized support is required. Finally, manual installation of a VPN client is often required,
which is labour intensive.
RDS

The second way to connect in cloud computing is through a Remote Desktop Server or RDS. With RDS,
only the software user interface is transferred to the user’s computer screen. All data is stored on a
remote server, and any user input is transmitted to the remote server. What appears on the computer
screen is arriving from the server via the internet. All users have the same desktop experience.

The reasons for connecting to cloud computing via an RDS are that because a single operating system
image is

administered, low bandwidth is required, and server machines required are low. Additionally, an RDS is
simple to deploy and software redundancies don’t occur. Finally, applications, patches and driver updates
can be managed from one location, so less work is required.

Disadvantages of using an RDS are that the generic interface doesn’t provide a customized user
experience, and as a result, users will see applications that don’t necessarily pertain to them. Additionally,
the server operating system is often different to the end user than a consumer operating system. Finally,
because all users have access to the RDS server, there’s a risk of server infection or malicious activity.
VDI

The final way to connect to cloud computing is through Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI. With VDI,
each user is given dedicated space on a remote server and can create a customized desktop experience
that can be accessed anywhere via the internet. The key difference between VDI and RDS is the
customization of the desktop – instead of a generic interface that everyone accesses once logged in, VDI
users have their own user experience.

A benefit of using VDI is that each user has a customized operating experience that is stored on a server.
This results in lower user hardware costs because less storage capacity is required on each individual
computer. Applications, patches and driver updates can be managed from one location, resulting in less
work. It is also simple to update and manage software across all systems. Finally, with VDI, it is easier to
deploy machines en masse.

Drawbacks of VDI center around what also makes VDI beneficial. Compute requirements are higher than
RDS, and as a result, powerful server hardware is required for optimal performance. This also results in
higher storage capacity requirements. And, licensing costs are higher because each user requires their
own software on their own computer.

Reference website: https://sysgen.ca/cloud-computing-basics/