When it comes to modern technologies, many people tend to misunderstand terms such as Virtualization and Hyperconvergence. Put merely, hyper-convergence is a technology that is used for changing the way data centers work. It changes the infrastructure of data centers, making them more efficient, secure, reliable, scalable, and more.
However, our topic for today is virtualization, and its role and impact, even though understanding it requires some understanding of hyper-convergence itself. Simply put, if we think of hyper-convergence as an IT infrastructure model, then virtualization would be a process that is used for obtaining this model. It is a process of running a virtual version of a computer system in a separate layer, where it doesn’t depend on actual hardware.
What does virtualization actually do?
As you may know, the crowning achievement of hyper-convergence is the Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC), where all servers, services, and computing devices are defined in software models. One example of a hyper-converged system is a Virtual Machine (VM).
Meanwhile, VM uses the process of virtualization to represent a computer environment that is based on a software-defined structure. This allows us to use virtualization to identify how many CPU cores there are, what amount of RAM is being used, the type of storage and network adaptor, storage capacity, and all other aspects of a system.
In other words, virtualization is being used to hyper-converged physical components into virtual machines. Once these aspects are hyper-converged, they become entirely independent of the physical hardware, which allows us to move and reorganize them between host computers, and provide fault tolerance.
Due to all of its strengths, virtualization is often considered to be the backbone of cloud computing, which offers significant benefits through convenience. However, none of it would be possible without virtualization, which also provides solutions for several significant challenges in the field of data security and the protection of privacy.
In this environment, virtualization acts as the imitation of hardware while being inside a software program. It allows multiple computers to operate on a single machine. It uses resources with extreme efficiency, and it allows for greater portability, security, and all of this while reducing cost.
The importance and use of cases of virtualization
Virtualization has numerous use cases, such as:
- Combining network and local resources data storage
- Grouping physical storage devices into one, single unit
- Improves performance
- Allows reaching high levels of availability
- Improves capacity
- and more.
All of these reasons are what encourages people to utilize virtualization in computing. For desktop users, the ability to run apps meant for different operating systems is only possible thanks to virtualization. Otherwise, they would have to reboot systems or switch to other computers. At the same time, server administrators use it to offer different OS’.
And, of course, virtualization also offers a way to break an extensive system into smaller parts, and allow for more efficient use of servers. That way, they are used by numerous users, in countless different ways, depending on what they need.
Not only that, but virtualization also allows for isolation, which it provides by keeping programs that run inside the VM safe from any process that is going on in another VM that takes place on the same host.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we can say that virtualization allows the creation of virtual hardware, software, and an entire operating system, in addition to a storage or network device. It provides for all of this to happen within the software, and it conducts different tests, analyses, and other processes much more quickly than it would occur in a physical environment.
Virtualization brings efficiency, and it holds great potential for future cloud computing development, making it easier to secure data and other components.