Five Types of Virtualization
1. Hardware Virtualization
Normally, a server devotes complete control of it's hardware resources (cpu, RAM, and storage) to the actions of a single operating system.
When you virtualize your hardware, it means that a program called a hypervisor manages the hardware's resources and divides them among different isolated operating systems, referred to as “virtual machines.”
Fig 15: Hardware Virtualization
Advantage
- It prevents a single application crash running on the server.
- Portability - With modern hypervisors an IT team can migrate running virtual machines from one server to another - allowing them to do updates and maintenance without ever having downtime for the application.
2. Desktop Virtualization
Desktop Virtualization separates the desktop environment from the physical device that is used to access it.
Advantage
- The desktops are accessed remotely
- This creates a lot of flexibility for employees to work from home
3. Application virtualization
The user will interact with the native application on the client device using tablets or smart phones.
Advantage
- Efficiency- In many situations where remote applications are useful, applications are redundant across employees.
Fig: Application Virtualization
4. Storage Virtualization
Storage virtualization improves storage flexibility by creating a unified virtual pool of storage from physical storage devices in a network. It presents all physical storage in a cluster as a single shared group - visible to all servers.
Fig 17: Storage Virtualization
5. Network Virtualization
Network virtualization pools resources from all physical networking equipment and presents it to virtual machines and applications as a single virtual network.
Advantage
It reduces the provisioning time for new network architectures.