Virtualization

Week 20

This week

Virtualization– What is it?– Software on different operating systems?

Group Presentations – 10-15 minutes per group

What is it?

“...a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources; or it can include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single logical resource." taken from:Mann and Andi (N/A

VMWare

VMware allows multiple operating systems can run unmodified and at the same time on a standard PC.

For developers:– run multiple development environments on your desktop

without rebooting – isolate and protect operating environments, applications and

data – interoperate among operating systems

For users, VMware makes it possible to run Windows applications with Linux.

Taken from Nieh and Leonard (2000)

It makes a standard PC hardware within a VM appear to run multiple unmodified PC operating systems simultaneously on the same machine.

Done by running each operating system in its own VM. Still need a native OS to the machine – host OS. An OS running as effectively as an application on top of VMware

is called a "guest OS."

Virtual PC

Microsoft’s Virtual PC download from: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/virtualpc/default.mspx

Free Works in a similar way to VMWare

Issues

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.9428

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.18204

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.20446

Storage virtualisation

An unlimited number of storage resources over shared physical storage infrastructure, i.e. SAN (Storage Area Network).

Desktop Virtualisation

desktop operating systems are installed onto emulated hardware.

Or, Users accessing a remote desktop on a multi-user operating systems. 

Network Virtualisation

Example, Cisco Systems VLAN technology allowing logical segmentation of network.

References

Mann and Andi (N/A), Virtualization 101, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), <http://www.emausa.com/ema_lead.php?ls=virtwpws0806&bs=virtwp0806>.

Cited by Wikipedia. Nieh J and Leonard OC (2000) “Examining Vmware” DrDobbs Journal

http://www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/publications/drdobbs2000.pdf http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.9428 http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.18204 http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.20446