Overview

• Virtualization for Data-center Automation

• Virtualization and Cloud Computing

• Technology Examples
Virtualization for Data-center Automation
• Data-center automation means that huge volumes of hardware,
software, and database resources in these data centers can be allocated
dynamically to millions of Internet users simultaneously, with
guaranteed QoS and cost-effectiveness.

• Data centers have grown rapidly in recent years, and all major IT
companies are pouring their resources into building new data centers.
In addition, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, HP, Apple, and IBM
are all in the game.

• The latest virtualization development highlights high availability (HA),

backup services, workload balancing, and further increases in client
bases.
Intro to Data Center
• A data center is a building, dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to
house Information Systems such as computer systems and associated components, such
as servers, routers, storage, UPS, cooling units, Power Distribution Unit (PDU).
• Data centers have unique and typically large power requirements.
• Data center provides a range on Information Technology services includes:
• Email services
• Data storage and management
• Web hosting
• Application hosting
• Example – Google Data Center - https://www.google.co.in/search?
q=Google+data+center&sxsrf=APq-WBvJ-BRKU4IvmbmV039M8XYgSRc-
CA:1650266362085&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjLx6-
iiZ33AhXLS2wGHU3xB48Q_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1280&bih=552&dpr=1.5
 Data Center Vs Cloud
• Data Centers
• Require specialized equipment and knowledge
• Owner maintains complete control over hardware
• Highly customized
• Component of a Cloud

• Cloud
• Self service, Pay per use
• Platform independent
• Requires no specialized knowledge in computing
• Composed of many data centers
Data Center Vs Cloud - Example

• Data center or Cloud

• Buying a car – ???

• Taking / Hiring taxi – ???
 Data Center
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfvbCggY_nI
 Automation
• Automation is basically the delegation (allocation/assignment) of human
control function to technical equipment for,
• Increasing Productivity
• Increasing Quality
• Reducing Cost
• Increasing Safety in working conditions

• The most recent development of virtualized data centers and their

automation.
 Why to automate data center?

• With increasing number of virtualized servers, storage and computing

resources, management of resources poses a difficult task for IT organizations.
Automated data centers should be mandate, not just
a requirement??? Justify
Virtualization for Data-center Automation

• Server consolidation

• Virtual storage management

• Cloud OS for Virtualized Data Centers

• Trust management in automated data-center designs

Virtualization for Data-center Automation (Contd…)
• Server Consolidation in Data Centers
• Issue - most servers in data centers are underutilized. A large amount of
hardware, space, power, and management cost of these servers is wasted. 
Data centers need to optimize their resource management.

• Server consolidation is an approach to improve the low utility ratio of hardware

resources by reducing the number of physical servers.

• Advantages:-
• Consolidation enhances hardware utilization. Many underutilized servers
are consolidated into fewer servers to enhance resource utilization.
Consolidation also facilitates backup services and disaster recovery.
• The total cost of ownership is reduced.
• Improves availability and business continuity.
Virtualization for Data-center Automation (Contd…)
• Virtual Storage Management
• Storage virtualization was largely used to describe the aggregation and
repartitioning of disks at very coarse time scales for use by physical machines.

• In system virtualization, virtual storage includes the storage managed by VMMs

and guest OSs.

• The data stored in this environment can be classified into two categories:
• VM images and application data
• The VM images are special to the virtual environment, while application
data includes all other data which is the same as the data in traditional
OS environments.
Virtualization for Data-center Automation (Contd…)
• VM Images
• A VM image is an executable image file from a VM; this image file is in a special storage format.
• We can create a new VM by uploading the image file to the physical machine.
• Example - Usually some software, like mysql or ms office, is installed on these new VMs
beforehand. Users can choose different VM images to install.
• https://www.linuxvmimages.com/
Virtualization for Data-center Automation (Contd…)
• Cloud OS for Virtualized Data Centers
• Data centers must be virtualized to serve as cloud providers.
Virtualization for Data-center Automation (Contd…)
• Eucalyptus for Virtual Networking of Private Cloud
Virtualization for Data-center Automation (Contd…)
• Eucalyptus for Virtual Networking of Private Cloud

• Instance Manager controls the execution, inspection, and terminating of VM

instances on the host where it runs.
• Group Manager gathers information about and schedules VM execution on
specific instance managers, as well as manages virtual instance network.
• Cloud Manager is the entry-point into the cloud for users and administrators. It
queries node managers for information about resources, makes scheduling
decisions, and implements them by making requests to group managers.
Virtualization for Data-center Automation (Contd…)
• Trust Management in Virtualized Data Centers
• Problem
• VMM provides a layer of software between the operating systems and system hardware to
create one or more VMs on a single physical platform.
• A VM entirely encapsulates the state of the guest operating system running inside it.
Encapsulated machine state can be copied and shared over the network and removed like a
normal file, which proposes a challenge to VM security.
• Solution – VM-Based Intrusion Detection (inside VMM Hypervisor)
• VMM In general, a VMM can provide secure isolation and a VM accesses hard-ware
resources through the control of the VMM, so the VMM is the base of the security
of a virtual system.
• Normally, one VM is taken as a management VM to have some privileges such as
creating, suspending, resuming, or deleting a VM.
• VM-based IDS (Intrusion Detection System) can isolate guest VMs on the same
hardware platform.
• IDS should be integrated into the VMM. (HIDS – Host-based IDS & NIDS – Network-
based IDS)
Virtualization and Cloud Computing
• Plays an important role in cloud computing since it allows for the appropriate degree of
customization, security, isolation and manageability
• Primarily used to offer configurable computing environments and storage.
• Hardware and programming language virtualization are the techniques adopted in cloud
computing systems.
• Hardware virtualization enabling solution in IaaS.
• Programming language virtualization in PaaS.
• Virtualization provides:
• Consolidating
• Isolation
• Controlled environments
• https://v2cloud.com/blog/virtualization-vs-cloud-computing#:~:text=Cloud
%20computing%20is%20a%20computing,managed%20by%20a%20service%20provider.
Virtualization and Cloud Computing
• Server consolidation
• When the resources are underutilized, because it allows reducing the number of
active resources by aggregating virtual machines over a smaller number of
resources that become fully utilized.
• While the movement of virtual machine instances is called as Virtual Machine
Migration.
• Because virtual machine instances are controllable environments, consolidation
can be applied with a minimum impact, either by temporarily stopping its
execution and moving its data to the new resources or by performing a finer
control and moving the instance while it is running.  Live Migration

• Server consolidation and virtual machine migration are principally used in the
case of hardware virtualization.
Virtualization and Cloud Computing
• Live Migration and Server consolidation
Virtualization and Cloud Computing (Contd…)
Virtualization and Cloud Computing (Contd…)
Technology Examples

• Xen: Para virtualization

• Vmware: Full virtualization

• Microsoft Hyper-V
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Xen: Para virtualization
• Xen is an open-source initiative implementing a virtualization platform based
on para virtualization.

• Xen Hypervisor  Xen-based technology is used for either desktop

virtualization or server virtualization, and recently it has also been used to
provide cloud computing solutions by means of Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).
• allows high-performance execution of guest operating systems.

• Recently Xen has been advanced to support full virtualization using hardware-
assisted virtualization.

• Xen based virtualization is done by modifying portions of the guest operating

systems run by Xen with reference to the execution of such instructions.
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Xen architecture and guest OS management
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Vmware: Full virtualization
• It is a virtualization technique used to provide a virtual machine environment
which is a complete simulation of the underlying hardware.
• All operating systems and applications which can run natively on the hardware
can also be run in the virtual machine.
• The guest OS need not be modified.
• Each VM is independent of each other.
• Vmware is well known for the capability to virtualize x86 architectures, which
runs unmodified on top of their hypervisors.
• Binary translation is one specific approach to implement full virtualization that
does not require hardware virtualization features. It involves examining the
executable code of the virtual guest for "unsafe" instructions, translating
these into "safe" equivalents, and then executing the translated code.
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Vmware: Full virtualization (Contd…)
• CPU Virtualization is only a component of a fully virtualized environment.

• Vmware achieves full virtualization by providing virtual representation of

memory and I/O devices.

• To avoid nested translation, the translation look-aside buffer(TLB) in the

virtual MMU directly maps physical pages, and the performance slowdown
only occurs incase of a TLB miss.

• Finally, VMware also provides full virtualization of I/O devices such as network
controllers and other peripherals such as keyboard, mouse, disks, and
universal serial bus (USB) controllers.
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Full virtualization reference model
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Vmware workstation architecture
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Vmware ESX Server & ESXi Server
• Vmware ESX Server and VMware ESXi (enhanced version), are examples of the
hypervisor-based approach.
• Both installed on bare metal servers and provide services for virtual machine
management.
• VMware ESXi implements a very thin OS layer and replaces the service console
with interfaces and services for remote management, thus considerably
reducing the hypervisor code size and memory footprint.
• The base of the infrastructure is the VMkernel, which is a thin Portable
Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant operating system that provides
the minimal functionality for processes and thread management, file system,
I/O stacks, and resource scheduling.
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Vmware ESXi server architecture
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Hyper-V is an infrastructure virtualization solution developed by Microsoft for
server virtualization.
• It uses a hypervisor-based approach to hardware virtualization, which
leverages several techniques to support a variety of guest operating systems.
• It is a component of Windows Server 2008 R2 that installs the hypervisor as a
role within the server.
• Architecture
• Hyper-V supports multiple and concurrent execution of guest operating
systems by means of partitions.
• A partition is a completely isolated environment in which an operating
system is installed and run.
• Hyper-V takes control of the hardware, and the host operating system
becomes a virtual machine instance with special privileges, called the
parent partition.
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Architecture (Contd…)
• The parent partition(also called the root partition) is the only one that has
direct access to the hardware.

• It runs the virtualization stack, hosts all the drivers required to configure
guest operating systems, and creates child partitions through the
hypervisor.

• Child partitions are used to host guest operating systems and do not have
access to the underlying hardware, but their interactions with it is
controlled by either the parent partition or the hypervisor itself.
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• Microsoft Hyper-V Architecture
Technology Examples (Contd…)
• There are three fundamental components: VMBus, Virtual Service
Providers (VSPs), and Virtual Service Clients (VSCs).
• VMBus implements the channel and defines the protocol for communication
between partitions.

• VSPs are kernel-level drivers that are deployed in the parent partition and
provide access to the corresponding hardware devices.

• These interact with VSCs, which represent the virtual device drivers (also called
as synthetic drivers) seen by the guest operating systems in the child partitions.