Virtualization Solutions

Virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of resources across many aspects of computing. OS Virtualization provides framework for dividing the resources of a computer into multiple environments so that different OS can run in their respective environment simultaneously.

So what’s the advantage of Virtualization? Why has it caught so much of industry attention?
Virtualization helps to reduce IT costs by providing virtual infrastructure. Virtual infrastructure also reduces hardware maintenance and hardware up gradation costs.

Virtualization can help developers who want to test their application on different platforms. Instead of using physical hardware for each platform, the developers use the Virtual infrastructure to test their applications.

Virtualization lends a helping hand to the Support Department. If you provide product support on multiple platforms, you can use the virtual infrastructure to quickly debug on multiple platforms at a very low TCO.

There are many Virtualization solutions available from different vendors:

• VMWare


• Microsoft Virtual PC (formerly Connectix)


• Xen and many others.

I am going to focus on the above 3 solutions on this blog.

VMWare:

VMWare is certainly the most prominent player in the Virtualization solutions. VMware virtualizes all devices within the virtual environment, including the video adapter, network adapter, and hard disk adapters. It also provides pass-through drivers for USB, serial, and parallel devices - for example, irrespective of make and model of the physical network adapter on the system, the guest machine will see an AMD PCnet network adapter.

Because all guest virtual machines use the same hardware drivers regardless of the actual hardware on the host computer, virtual machine instances are highly portable between computers. For example, a running virtual machine can be paused, copied to another physical computer, and unpaused to resume execution exactly where it left off. With Vmotion, a new feature in VMware's VirtualCenter, it is no longer even necessary to pause a virtual machine while moving it — virtual machines can now be kept running even while they migrate to different hosts.

VMWare provides different commercial solutions:

• VMWare workstation


• VMWare GSX Server


• VMWare ESX Server

VMWare has recently made available its scaled-down version of VMWare workstation as VMPlayer free of cost. With VMPlayer, you cannot create any new virtual machines. Rather, you can run the virtual machines created using other VMWare products.

Advantages:

• Very intuitive UI.Desktop & Server hosted Virtualization solutions.


• Fully virtualized (emulated) environment for the guest OS.


• Support for various guest operating systems.


• Portability of virtual machines to different platforms.

Most suited for:

Software Application support/testing across multiple platforms – VMWare provides fully emulated environment so that applications run the same as it would on physical hardware.

Not Suited for:

Device driver development – Since the guest runs in a virtualized environment with virtual hardware, it is not possible to emulate a particular hardware. This limitation applies to any system level application development with VMWare.

Microsoft Virtual PC:

Microsoft acquired Connectix Corporation, a provider of virtualization solutions in early 2003. Microsoft now markets their virtualization solution as Microsoft Virtual PC. Virtual PC works very similar to VMWare workstation. Virtual PC provides a virtualized environment with virtual hardware for the guest operating systems.

(more about xen some other day…)