Week 7: Muddy

I suppose there is no good way to make virtualization clear. Though I left the lesson feeling I did understand it, I felt looking it up online would be helpful. I was also interested in it being a viable option opposed to dual-booting or using Apple's Boot Camp.


Essentially, it all comes down to the advent of multi-core processors. In fact, virtualization has been around for a long time but the process could only be used on super-computers and the like. Since 2005 or so, multi-core processing has allowed us to harness this tool on servers and PCs.


Many in the class were likely confused in that virtualization and cloud computing seem similar (especially when talking about virtualization on a server for use by an enterprises staff). I found this definition helpful:


"One way to look at it is that virtualization is basically one physical computer pretending to be many computing environments whereas cloud computing is many different computers pretending to be the one computing environment (hence user scaling).  Virtualization provides flexibility that is a great match for cloud computing.  Moreover, cloud computing can be defined based on the virtual machine containers created with virtualization.  Virtualization is not always necessary in cloud computing; however, you can use it as the basis.  Cloud computing is an approach for the delivery of services while virtualization is one possible service that could be delivered."                                
                                                                                    -from erpsoftwareblog.com


As far as using virtualization on a PC to run multiple OS, I found this info to be particularly helpful:


"The concept of virtualization is hard to explain, but in essence, what it does is to allow you to use a single physical machine to create one or more environments that look and act just like they were separate physical boxes...When you run the program, you get to define a virtual machine by telling the system how much disk space and RAM to set aside, what kind of network access you want to set up, and so on. You then “boot” the virtual machine using a bootable CD or DVD (or an ISO image file) and install the operating system in the VM. When you’re done, you can go to the window containing the VM and do anything you would do on a physical machine."
                                                                       -EdBott.com

                                          Photo by: cote (flickr.com)


This I find particularly great in that I can keep Linux open in separate space allowing me to learn from playing with it, while still maintaining Mac OS X with which I am more comfortable. Of course it has many other, and likely better, uses. But for me this is a profound advancement from dual-booting (which I had played with many years ago on a Windows PC).


Finally, what was least clear to me this week was the concept of the hypervisor. I won't go into that here however I found a great web page that explains it here. Simply put, it is the mechanism that allows multiple OS to exist on hardware. It does this by allocating resources to each OS and making sure there is no overlap. I am no "1337" computer nerd by far, but this is extremely interesting stuff and is well worth taking a look at.