ABC of Virtualization

Kamran Ghyan
2 min readDec 8, 2020

Today I’ll discuss basics of virtualization. You may be know, virtualization is very old technology. But it’s still applicable to building your cloud computing strategy now days.

What is virtualization?

Virtualization is the process of creating a software-based, virtual version of something, whether it’s compute, storage, networking, servers, or any applications.

What makes virtualization viable is called a hypervisor, And now what a hypervisor is, is it’s a software that runs above the physical server or host.

What Hypervisor do is, essentially , pool the resources from the physical server and allocate them to your virtual environments.

virtualization, hypervisor, host

There are different types of Hypervisor.

Types of Hypervisor

  • Type 1
  • Type 2

TYPE 1

Let first discuss Type 1 Hypervisor that is installed directly on top of the physical server. They’re also called bare metal hypervisors.

TYPE 2

Type 1 Hypervisor that sits between physical server and hypervisor. We can also called them hosted hypervisor.

When you have installed hypervisor you can now able to build virtual environments and virtual machines.

Wait! what is that VM’s or virtual machines ?

A VM is simply a software based computer, they work like a physical computer, they have their own operating systems and applications.

We can run multiple hypervisor and the hypervisor manages the resources that allocated to these virtual environments from the physical server and each hypervisor work independent.

Now you can run different OS on different virtual machines e.g Windows, Linux and Mac-OS etc.

That is core job of virtualization.

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Kamran Ghyan

Software Engineer, System Architecture, Cloud Architecture, AI enthusiastic