Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Server Virtualization Explained


You have probably heard about lots of distinct types of server virtualization; full, bare metal, para-virtualization, guest OS, OS assisted, hardware assisted, hosted, OS level, kernel level, shared kernel, hardware emulation, hardware virtualization, hypervisor based, containers or native virtualization. Confusing, right?

Fear not my faithful readers; the whole purpose of this blog is exactly to explain these things so that everyone can have a clear view over issues usually restricted to a bunch of geeks. But keep in mind that some of these terms are popularized by certain vendors and do not have a common industry-wide acceptance. Plus, many of the terms are used rather loosely and interchangeably (which is why they are so confusing).

Although others classify the current virtualization techniques in a different way, I will use the following criteria:

  1. Full Virtualization;
  2. Para-Virtualization;
  3. Operating System-level Virtualization;
  4. Hardware assisted virtualization.

On the following exciting chapters I will explain these techniques, one by one, but before that I believe it would be useful to give you a quick introduction to some underlying concepts.

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