IJCAT - International Journal of Computing and Technology, Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2015

ISSN : 2348 - 6090

www.IJCAT.org

Virtualization Techniques and Virtualization

Challenges in Cloud Computing: A Review
1
Bohar Singh, 2 Jagdeep Singh, 3 Sahil Kumar
1, 2, 3
CSE Department, SBSSTC, Ferozepur,
Punjab, India

Abstract - Cloud computing is a popular and growing trend

in internet technology that enhance application potentialities
in terms of functioning, collaborative execution approach
and elastic resource management. The virtualization is a
core part of cloud computing which enables engineering or
intellectual IT resources on demand dynamic allocation of
resources such as network, storage, application, server and
client. Virtualization becomes significant as a way to develop
system security, provide greater flexibility, reliability and
reduce costs. This paper describes different types of
virtualization and how it helps to expand elasticity of the
resources in cloud computing environment. This paper gives
a detailed review on various virtualization techniques,
challenges and future research direction.

Keywords - Cloud Computing, Virtualization, VM Sprawl,

Hypervisor, Challenges. Fig 1 Traditional Architecture

1. Introduction

Many year ago Virtualization [1] was came up with idea

of sharing of huge expensive resources among different
application environments. This enables an organization to
interact with their IT resources in a more efficient way
and allows for a much greater utilization. Therefore,
virtualization technologies have rapidly become a
standard piece of deployment in many IT organizations.
An example of virtualization is depicted with help of
diagram. In figure 1 traditional IT infrastructure is
depicted and in figure 2 a new IT infrastructure is
depicted that uses virtualization. An IT infrastructure can
be seen as everything that supports the flow and
processing of information such as the physical hardware
that interconnects computers and users, plus the software Fig 2 Virtual Architecture

that enables sending, receiving and management of

information. Virtualization of resources is achieved with Both IT infrastructures consist of a storage, network,
help of hypervisor [18] which allow dynamic allocation of server, operating system and application layer. In the
resources to virtual machine. traditional architecture, all the components of one layer

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IJCAT - International Journal of Computing and Technology, Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2015
ISSN : 2348 - 6090
www.IJCAT.org
that is application are connected to a single component of
another layer. It means each server is comprised of one
operating system, a set of applications, a network and a
storage device. The network connects the different servers
and storage systems together and can also connect the
server to other public IT infrastructures such as the
internet or private IT infrastructures from other
organizations. In figure 2 virtualization layer enables to
install number of operating system and each operating
system comprises of different number of application. In
simple words virtualization refers to technologies that are
designed to provide a layer of abstraction between layers
of hardware and software, as well as layers of software
that enables a more simplified interaction with it. There
are many different virtualization technologies that
concentrate on particular layers of the IT infrastructure
that together enable the transformation of a traditional IT
infrastructure into a virtual IT infrastructure. Currently,
there are many virtualization vendors that offer the same
kind of virtualization technologies, but use a different
approach and implementation method underneath. Atos
Origin, who is a virtualization service provider, uses
virtualization technologies of different virtualization
providers to provide suitable IT solutions according to the
wishes of their clients, which are often large enterprises.
2. Server Virtualization
Server virtualization [9] is the main virtualization domain
in which a (physical) server is converted into a
virtual server. A physical server is often used term by
virtualization vendors to describe the difference
between a virtual server and a physical server. The term
physical server refers to the hardware that
does the actual computing processing imposed by the
software, such as operating system and
applications. A virtual server cannot operate without a
physical server. With server virtualization,
multiple physical servers can be converted into virtual
servers and be placed on one physical server,
which is called the host. The virtual servers are called the
guests.
2.1 Full Virtualization
Each virtual machine can run any operating system
supported by the underlying hardware. Besides the fact,
that this is the most commonly used virtualization
technology, true full virtualization where the virtual
processors have to reproduce the CPU operations of the
host machine is hard to achieve. Moreover, the overhead
of handling these CPU operations makes true full
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virtualization difficult to manage. However the virtual
machine environment that provides "enough
representation of the underlying hardware to allow guest
operating systems to run without modification can be
considered to provide Full Virtualization.
Fig 3 Full Virtualization
In this kind of setup the I/O devices are allotted to the
guest machines by imitating the physical devices in the
virtual machine monitor; interacting with these devices in
the virtual environment are then directed to the real
physical devices either by the host operating system driver
or by the "hypervisor driver. As shown in fig 3 full
virtualization comes with a performance penalty, the
technique permits running unmodified operating system,
which is ideal, particularly when source is unavailable
such as with proprietary operating systems. Today there
are number of virtualization technologies which provides
full virtualization such as VMware's family of
hypervisors, Xen and XenServer from
Citrix, VirtualBox from Oracle and KVM from RedHat
(among others).
2.2 Paravirtualization
Unlike full virtualization, in paravirtualization the
running guest OS should be modified in order to be
operated in the virtual environment. Fig 4 depicts that
paravirtualization is a subset of server virtualization,
which provides a thin software interface between the host
hardware and the modified guest OS. An interesting fact
in this technology is that the guest machines are aware of
the fact that they are running in a virtualized
environment. One of the main characteristics of
paravirtualization technology is, the virtual machine
monitor is simple which allows paravirtualization to
achieve performance closer to nonvirtualized hardware.
Device interaction in paravirtualized environment is very
similar to the device interaction in full virtualized
environment; the virtual devices in paravirtualized
IJCAT - International Journal of Computing and Technology, Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2015
ISSN : 2348 - 6090
www.IJCAT.org
environment also rely on physical device drivers of the
underlying host
Fig 4 Paravirtualization
3. Other Virtualization Techniques
3.1 Application Virtualization
In Application virtualization, the user is able to run a
server application locally using the local resources
without needing the complexity of completely installing
this application on his/her computer. Such virtualized
applications are designed to run in a small virtual
environment containing only the resources needed for the
application to execute. Thus in application virtualization
each user have an isolated application environment
virtually. This small isolated virtual environment acts as a
layer between the application and the host operating
system [10].
3.2 Resource Virtualization
Virtualizing system specific resources such as "storage
volumes, name spaces and the network resources is
known as resource virtualization. There are various
approaches to perform resource virtualization. Some of
them are, Aggregating many individual components into
larger resource pool, Grid computing or computer clusters
where multiple discrete computers are combined to form a
large supercomputers with enormous resources,
partitioning a single resource such as disk space into
number of smaller and easily accessible resources of same
type.
3.3 Storage Virtualization
Storage virtualization [19] is a form of Resource
virtualization, where a logical storage is created by
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abstracting all the physical storage resources that are
scattered over the network. First the physical storage
resources are aggregated to form a storage pool which
then forms the logical storage. This logical storage which
is the aggregation of scattered physical resources appears
to be a single monolithic storage device to the user.
Examples of storage devices are storage attached network
(SAN) and network attached storage (NAS). While
storage virtualization can be used in different or a
combination of storage devices, as shown in fig 5 storage
virtualization can be broken up into two general classes:
block virtualization and file virtualization.
Fig 5 Storage Virtualization
3.4 Desktop Virtualization
Desktop virtualization [13] is the separation of a desktop,
consisting of an operating system, applications and user
data, from the underlying endpoint. The endpoint is the
computer device which is used to access the desktop.
Desktop virtualization can be subdivided into two types:
“Client side” and “Server side” [14]. With server side
desktop virtualization, the end-user applications are
executed remotely, on a central server, and streamed
towards the endpoint via a Remote Display Protocol or
other presentation and access virtualization technology.
Controlling a desktop from a remote location is also
called presentation or access virtualization, because the
screen images are streamed from one location to another.
With client side desktop virtualization, the applications
are executed at the endpoint, which is the user location,
and presented locally on the user’s computer.
3.5 Network Virtualization
Network virtualization [6] was characterized by three
types of technologies: Virtual LAN (VLAN), Virtual IP
(VIP) and Virtual Private Network (VPN). This is
depicted in figure 6. Network virtualization is comprised
of a set of technologies that hide the true complexity of
the network and separates it into manageable parts. With
network virtualization multiple networks can be combined
into a single network, or a single network can be logically
separated into multiple parts [3]. The currently known
network virtualizations are Virtual LAN (VLAN), Virtual
IJCAT - International Journal of Computing and Technology, Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2015
ISSN : 2348 - 6090
www.IJCAT.org
IP (VIP) and Virtual Private Network (VPN). VPN and
VLAN are well-known, but network virtualization is still
developing and other network virtualization technologies
are expected to make their appearance in the near future
Virtual LAN (VLAN) is a method of creating independent
networks using a shared (physical) network. It is used to
logically segment and control the interaction between
different network segments. As virtual machines are
aggregated onto a physical machine, it's not unlikely that
they will communicate with one another. For this reason,
hypervisors include virtual networking abilities to
optimize network traffic. Note that this implies software-
based networking, but is commonly very efficient. A
virtual machine, as part of its virtualized platform, is
provided with a virtual NIC. This virtual NIC attaches
either to a physical NIC (on the physical platform) or to
virtual networking infrastructure within the hypervisor.
Fig 6 Network Virtualization
4. Virtualization Challenges: Two Challenges
There are still many issues with virtualization
technologies. For instance, in traditional environments
there are many tools that facilitate management and
security for IT infrastructures. However, for virtual
environments traditional management and security
technologies are often not suitable. These are two
virtualization challenges that were very apparent in the
virtualization events [20, 21, 22].
4.1 Challenge 1: Management
Organizations that have adopted virtualization
technologies are facing a number of management issues.
One of management issue in organization is server
consolidation in which the number of (physical) servers
can be significantly reduced to smaller number of
(physical) servers that are running multiple virtual
servers. While the hardware can significantly be reduced,
an organization still has to manage the large number of
virtual servers [25]. Furthermore, server virtualization
allows organizations to easily deploy new virtual servers
with the click of a mouse button. Although server
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consolidation reduces number of physical server but due
to a large number of virtual servers it become hard to
manage. Server virtualization introduced a new issue,
called VM sprawl.
Traditionally, if someone wants to deploy more servers
there is a whole process of ordering hardware and
procedures, but now IT administrators can deploy virtual
servers with a click on the mouse. There is often the
deception that virtual machines are free. However, the
deployment of new virtual machines can lead to the
requirement or purchase of additional hardware
resources. Deploying a couple new virtual servers might
not require additional resources, but in case of
VM sprawl, the virtual environment is characterized by
many redundant virtual machines that
inefficiently use resources. This could lead to the purchase
of more hardware, consisting of servers and
storage, and possibly additional licensing cost. Also,
while the virtual environment can be centrally
managed more IT staff might be needed to address and
solve the VM sprawl problem.
Another problem is the sharing of IT resources. As
resources are shared, the applications and data of different
departments of an organization can reside anywhere in
the virtual environment. Different departments of an
organization are often also reluctant of the idea on
sharing resources with other departments and losing
control of their own resources [26]. However, new
development in management tools has addressed some of
these problems.
4.2 Challenge 2: Security
Whereas more and more physical servers are being
virtualized, security issues associated with virtualization
have become more critical to address. In fact,
virtualization adds new challenges for organizations that
require involvement of information security measures in
initial stages of virtualization projects [19]. Virtualization
adds a new layer of software on a (physical) server and
like any software that is written by a “human being” it can
contain embedded and yet to be discovered vulnerabilities
that may be exploitable. When hackers get access to the
virtualization layer, which contains the hypervisor, all the
virtual machines could be compromised.
Furthermore, traditional security and management tools
inside an OS are not aware or designed to access, scan or
protect the virtualization layer. There are security tools for
virtualization, called virtual security appliances. Virtual
security appliances are security programs that are places
inside VMs. The VM is packaged with an OS and security
IJCAT - International Journal of Computing and Technology, Volume 2, Issue 6, June 2015
ISSN : 2348 - 6090
www.IJCAT.org
application, which can offer better performance, than
installing security application in each VM, due to its
dedicated approach. However, the security tools are still
placed on top of the virtualization layer, which has its
drawbacks, especially if the virtualization layer is
compromised [23]. Another risk is the communication
between virtual machines. Many virtual environments
include the ability to create virtual networks and switches
inside the host (or physical server) to enable virtual
machines to communicate directly. This traffic is not
visible to traditional physical network-based security
protection devices as the traffic goes through a virtual
network inside the host. Monitoring the traffic between
virtual machines on the same server requires security
measures placed inside the host.
5. Conclusions and Future Work
This paper discussed various virtualization techniques,
virtualization types and challenges in cloud computing
system to reduce IT costs and effective utilization of cloud
resources such as rapid elastic provisioning of virtual
machines, elastic application programming model. In
addition, the virtualization techniques get universal
support when users consider elastic resource management
issues and security issues before moving into cloud. In
future, we aim to develop new policies, framework and
techniques to maintain elastic resources and data
availability, as a result, the performances of cloud services
could steps into next higher level. This study paper
discussed various issues pertaining to cloud services
which can be used to design strong framework for
effective elastic resource management in cloud.
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