From the course: Virtualization: Configuring VMs Across Platforms with VMware, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, Vagrant, and KVM

Understanding virtualization

From the course: Virtualization: Configuring VMs Across Platforms with VMware, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, Vagrant, and KVM

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Understanding virtualization

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- All right, let's talk about virtualization. Why would you need virtualization? Well, to start with, let's talk about what actually is virtualization. In virtualization, software is used to emulate hardware. So you can install a computer operating system in software. That is what it's about. On top of this emulated hardware and operating system. And that is the virtual machine can be installed and doing so is offering multiple benefits. For instance, it allows you to more efficiently use hardware resources. That's why you see virtualization in corporate data centers. It also allows you to run multiple operating systems on one platform, and that's a developer option, or the administrator or student option who wants to learn about different operating systems. Now, why would you want to use virtualization in data centers? Well, very important is for more efficient resource usage. The use of hardware can be maximized as compared to physical computing, and that's a huge benefit. You can also reduce downtime. When a hardware server goes down, virtual machines that are running, it can easily be restarted elsewhere. If you are using a solution like VMware, vSphere, which provides an entire virtualization cluster, it's offering increased flexibility. Virtual machines are installed on an existing platform and it's not needed to deploy new servers first. Just imagine in the old days, if you were running out of server capacity, you needed a purchase order before you could buy your new hardware. Once you had your purchase order, you could go to your favorite IT vendor to purchase your server, which needed to be built and delivered at your site. That easily took six weeks or more. In virtual machines, you just click your virtual machine and you have your new instance up and running in no time. Also, in the data center, virtualization is offering easier, high-availability. Virtual machines can be moved around easily if they are deployed on a cluster of surface. And if one physical server goes down, another server easily takes over. In the data center, virtualization also allows you to realize green IT. So virtualization offers for a much more efficient use of hardware resources, where in the past, one application often needed one operating system instance that was installed on a dedicated hardware server. With virtualization, many operating system instances can run on the same hardware platform, and that makes it more efficient and that allows you to use the hardware in a much better way, up to 80% of hardware utilization instead of 15%. And, you know, that makes a huge difference in the size of a data center, because less physical servers are needed. Less physical servers is less, e-waste is less electricity, so that's good for the planet. Apart from the data center, there's also a virtualization on your laptop, and that is what this course is mainly about, how to create virtual machines on your laptop. But why would you want to do that? Well, you can easily install another operating system like any other application. So if you want to learn Linux and you are on Windows, you can easily install Linux as a full virtual machine. And I know Windows is offering WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, but that is not as complete as a virtual machine. A virtual machine is really giving you the real experience as if you weren't installing the operating system on top of real hardware. So any operating system can be insult as a virtual machine, and that allows you to learn other operating systems easily. It also allows you to test other operating systems in an isolated environment. And for developers, that is interesting because it allows you as a developer to develop for any platform.

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