Virtualization

What exactly is virtualization?

Virtualization is the process in which hardware resources such as servers, storage devices, network devices, and even operating systems are abstracted and provided over the internet as per our requirments. This enables organization and teams to provision IT resources on demand.

Prior to virtualization, teams had to depend on provisioning physical servers on-premises, which came with major inefficiencies - cost, space, IT teams to manage their data centers, to name a few.Now that we have got an understanding of what virtualization is, lets dive into the core componenents of it -

Host (OS) machine

This is the machine (server) that will be used as the hardware resource to to be virtualized. For example, this macine could be the laptop im using right now.

Guest (OS) machine

The guest machine is the virtual machine (VM) we run on top of the host machine.

Hypervisor

The Hypervisor is the software layer that will enable the host machine to share its resources among many virtual machines as per our requirements.

There are two types of hypervisors - type 1 and type 2. Next, lets dive into the difference between these two types of hypervisors.

Type 1 hypervisor

In this case, the hypervisor is loaded directly onto the hardware of the host machine, which enables us to abstract and virtualize our host machine into VMs with their own operating systems. Type 1 hypervisors come with better performance in comparison to type 2, due to which, it has its own use cases. These hypervisors are used in production environments that require performance optimized resources. Some examples of type 1 hypervisors are - Hyper V, ESXi, and KVM

Type 2 hypervisor

On the other hand, type 2 hypervisor's are loaded onto the existing operating system on the host machine. For example - I could have a type 2 hypervisor running on my laptop that has a pre-existing OS (MacOS)

These hypervisors are not as performance optimized as type 1 because we have an additional layer (the host OS) in the process of virtualization here. Some examples of type 2 hypervisors are - Virtualbox, Parallels, Fusion

Here is a visual depiction of the difference between the two -

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