This article gives a simple overview of what virtualization is and some of the virtualization types used in the industry.
Virtualization began in the late 1960s with IBM’s CP-40 research system. Today, virtualization technology is now widely used in IT enterprise infrastructure. By 2027, the global virtualization software industry is expected to reach revenues ranging from $120 to 163 billion, according to Statista.
Below is Statista’s software virtualization market size forecast till 2027.
The market size of the global virtualization software market is estimated at between around 40 and 62 billion U.S. dollars today. According to various forecasts the virtualization software market is set to further grow over the next few years, reaching between 120 and 163 billion U.S. dollars in revenue by 2027. Server virtualization is the largest segment in the market.
Table of Contents
What is Virtualization?
Virtualization is a technology that allows a single physical server to be split up into multiple logical sub-servers, each behaving like the original physical server. Each logical server, also referred to as a virtual server or virtual machine (VM) contains its own operating system, CPU cores, disk space and kernel. This is achieved through software known as a hypervisor, which acts as a controller for running the VMs. The hypervisor interacts directly with the server’s hardware components—such as the CPU, memory, and storage—and dynamically allocates these resources among the VMs based on their demands.
Today, enterprises adopt virtualization technologies to make better use of their physical resources and increase their return on investment. Virtualization also powers the cloud computing industry. In fact, software as a service (SaaS) is one of the greatest market segments enabled by virtualization, with end-user spending expected to be more than $247 billion in 2024.
The technology that we discuss in this article, we use heavily in our day to day operations. Our affordable virtual servers come with NVMe drives and are based on the KVM virtualization technology that we talk about here. NVMe can make your site faster. To utilize our virtual servers, you can view virtual machine pricing and easily order a virtual server which is provisioned instantly.
Benefits of Virtualization
Use Resources Better
Virtualization helps your organization utilize hardware resources effectively. Instead of running one server on one computer system, you can create multiple virtual machines on the same hardware server. This minimizes the number of physical servers that businesses and data centers require.
Fewer physical servers save space in your data center and save the expenses of electricity and other infrastructure requirements such as backup power generators.
Recover Faster
While it takes hours or days to fix physical servers due to natural disasters or cyberattacks, the recovery process only takes minutes with virtualized environments.
You can restore a virtual machine from a snapshot or backup, which takes only minutes. Besides, virtual machines may be replicated across many sites, so if one site fails, you can fail over to another. As a result, companies can reduce downtime.
Boost Productivity
Virtualized environments use fewer physical resources, which reduces the time required to operate and maintain servers. Instead of manually updating each server, you may install and update the environment across all VMs in the server’s virtual configuration. Tasks that would normally take days or weeks in physical setups can be completed in minutes.
Improve Security
Security is one of the benefits of virtualization. When you virtualize your physical servers or applications, each virtual machine runs in its separate environment. As a result, if a security threat targets one virtual machine, it does not put the others in danger.
Support Remote Work
Besides, virtualization allows people to access their desktops or applications from any device anywhere with an internet connection. So, companies can hire remote talents.
How Virtualization Works
Virtualization uses a software layer called a “hypervisor” to create one or more virtual machines on a single physical machine. It serves as a bridge between virtual machines and the underlying physical hardware.
The hypervisor allocates basic physical computing resources – such as memory, storage, and processor, to each virtual machine on demand. The hypervisor guarantees that each virtual machine receives the resources specified in its configuration.
There are two main types of hypervisors:
- Type 1 hypervisor (a bare-metal hypervisor) runs directly on the computer hardware. Xen is a typical example of type 1 hypervisor.
- Type 2 hypervisors operate as applications on computer hardware that already has an operating system installed.
You can access the virtual machines like any other PC application. The physical device hosting them is called the server and the virtual operating systems are the guests.
Different Types of Virtualization
Server virtualization
Server virtualization separates a physical server into multiple virtual servers. Each virtual server also referred to as a virtual machine runs its own operating system independently to support numerous applications simultaneously running on the same physical machine.
Server virtualization enables one computer to execute the functions of multiple machines. Without server virtualization, servers only use a portion of their computing capability. Server virtualization is a cost-effective way for corporations to use server resources. It is the largest segment in the virtualization market today.
Network virtualization
Network virtualization is a technology that combines network resources to consolidate multiple physical networks into a virtual network, or divide one physical network into independent virtual networks.
VLAN is one of the most typical examples of network virtualization. It divides a huge network into smaller segments. This can improve performance, security, and organization.
Storage virtualization
Storage virtualization is the process of pooling physical storage from multiple network storage devices into a single storage device or centrally managed console. This helps administrators handle storage tasks such as archiving, backup, and recovery more easily and quickly.
Application virtualization
Application virtualization lets you access and run applications in a virtual environment without installing them directly on their operating system. You can run Microsoft Windows applications on a Linux machine and vice versa.
Application virtualization allows administrators to install an application once to a centralized server rather than to many PCs. Some application virtualization products include VMware ThinApp, Microsoft App-V, and Citrix Virtual Apps.
Desktop virtualization
Desktop virtualization is a method that runs multiple desktop operating systems on virtual machines, which lets users access remotely. VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix are the big giants in the desktop virtualization market.
There are three main desktop virtualization deployment models: Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Remote desktop services (RDS), and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). For example, Amazon WorkSpaces (AWS) is a popular DaaS solution, which lets companies manage virtual desktops in the AWS cloud.
Data virtualization
Data virtualization creates a software layer between the applications that use the data and the systems that store it. Data virtualization tools handle an application’s data requests and produce results that can be shared across different platforms.
A look at Virtualization Technologies: Xen vs KVM
What is Xen?
The University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory developed Xen, and in 2013, Xen was then acquired by the Linux Foundation. Xen is an open-source type-1 hypervisor that enables multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on the same computer hardware.
Xen supports both paravirtualization (PV) and hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM). As a type 1 hypervisor, Xen captures and monitors data related to CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network I/O.
Amazon EC2 used Xen as a VM hypervisor for their products. AWS is a founding member of the Xen Project. In recent years, Amazon has supported both Xen and KVM technology.
What is KVM?
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a hypervisor you can install on physical Linux machines to create virtual machines. KVM requires a Linux kernel installation on a computer with a CPU that supports virtualization extensions. KVM was included in the mainstream Linux kernel in 2007 and Red Hat is the largest commercial Linux distribution with complete support for KVM-based virtualization by company size.
KVM is a lightweight module included with the mainline Linux kernel that provides ease of implementation as well as continuing support for Linux heavyweights. One key advantage of KVM is that it integrates with the Linux OS kernel. KVM receives regular bug fixes, security patches, and performance updates as Linux publishes new releases.
Virtual machines operating on KVM can also benefit from Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), which ensures that virtual environments are secured from unauthorized access. Besides, KVM is a free and open-source solution, so don’t worry about expensive license costs.
Google Compute Engine (GCE) uses KVM as its hypervisor. As a component of Google Cloud Platform’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS), GCE runs on the same global infrastructure that powers Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, and other services. It enables users to launch virtual machines (VMs) on demand, which can be created from standard or custom images provided by users.
Industry giants like Google Cloud and even us at ServerCheap which is a micro company in comparison rely on the KVM hypervisor and KVM is just one of the many infrastructure components used to build Google Cloud.
Difference between Xen and KVM
The main difference between Xen and KVM is:
KVM, which is built into the Linux kernel, uses hardware-assisted virtualization to virtualize hardware components. Xen actively manages hardware resource distribution.
Xen hypervisor uses a microkernel design to run directly on bare-metal hardware. It supports systems without hardware virtualization extensions. Meanwhile, KVM cannot run on systems lacking hardware virtualization support.
Today, Xen is no longer as dominant in the virtualization market as it once was. KVM has grown fast. However, Xen is still actively used in certain environments and is one of the most popular hypervisors in the industry.
Virtualization vs Containerization
Containerization is a process that bundles application code with all related libraries and configuration files it needs to run on any infrastructure.
Virtualization uses a “hypervisor” to create virtual machines on a single physical machine. Containerization requires a single host kernel, or a “container” to run a single application. Container is good for creating and deploying applications. Some sources said containerization is a type of application virtualization.
Virtualization vs Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is any technology service that is accessed through the Internet. There are three main types of cloud computing services: Software as a service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
- Software as a Service (SaaS) – You usually run software which performs its tasks or executes remotely e.g., Ebay, Salesforce, Dropbox.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) – A development and deployment environment which you access remotely. It usually has all the required infrastructure. Examples include Amazon Web Services (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), Red Hat OpenShift, SAP Cloud.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Already working server hardware and components that can be utilized but are accessed remotely. This can include storage, memory, networking and processors. Examples include ServerCheap, KnownHost VPS, ServerDime.
Virtualization can make cloud computing possible, but cloud computing may not require virtualization. Cloud computing is a complete infrastructure. Both cloud computing and virtualization are scalable, but virtualization requires larger resource improvements to scale than cloud computing.
We offer virtual machines which are pretty inexpensive with great price-to-performance ratio. To utilize our virtual servers, you can view virtual machine pricing and easily buy a VM (Virtual Machine) which is provisioned instantly.
Conclusion
Virtualization is the process of taking physical machine’s functionality and partitioning them into separate logical machines or segregating them into virtual machines with each machine isolated from each other. Many server components, physical and logical can be virtualized. These include components like CPU, RAM, disk and servers and, can also include non physical components like applications.
Containerization has some similarities to virtualization, but the kernel stays the same and is shared between the containers, while in non container virtualization like KVM or Xen, each virtual machine is isolated and has its own independent kernel.
Virtualization is carried out by software called a hypervisor. The two main types of hypervisors are type 1, which are installed directly on to the physical machine and type 2 which are not installed directly on the physical machine but, the operating system is first installed and the type 2 hypervisor installs on this OS.
Xen and KVM are both popular hypervisors which have been and currently are in use by many cloud providers including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
