What is Virtualization?
Virtualization allows companies to run multiple operating systems and applications on one piece of hardware, maximizing computing resources in terms of cost-effectiveness, efficiency and performance. It is achieved by virtually separating the physical hardware from the operating system, thus allowing multiple operating systems to run side by side on the same machine.
Benefits of Virtualization
1. Save money on hardware - Virtualization consolidates multiple systems onto one piece of hardware and allows system upgrades to occur on your existing hardware with no downtime; therefore, when upgrading your systems, the costs associated with buying new hardware and downtime during upgrades are eliminated.
2. Keep your customers happy - Allows you to deliver more to your customers while gaining control of your IT costs by eliminating downtime and maximizing the efficiency and speed of your server and client systems, and consolidation of your hardware.
3. Enhance your organization's IT security - You can keep your data separate while still existing on the same machine. This means important corporate data can be kept completely separate from end-user data; or even keep all of your end-user data separate from one another. However, while this data is organized separately, it is still stored on one piece of hardware.
4. Keep your company running 24/7 - Provides continued operation during maintenance periods, and rapid recovery in unplanned outages. So no more business downtime and loss of revenue.
5. Re-use existing hardware - With a virtual network you are able to upgrade your company's IT systems without having to necessarily upgrade your hardware. Also, by running multiple systems on one piece of hardware you are able to utilize the capability of each piece of hardware to its fullest extent, instead of wasting money on idle hardware.
6. Reduce your energy consumption - The ability to run multiple operating systems and applications on one machine reduces the amount of hardware you need, thus reducing the amount of heat generated and energy used by your network.
7. Have your resources available where and when you need them - Stores your resources in an aggregate pool and enables you to pull them when you need to, and where you need them as necessary.
8. Improve your scalability - Growth is an important initiative, but it can be difficult when it comes with high IT costs to upgrade and meet your growth demands. Virtualization allows you to re-use your existing hardware, and easily add-on new applications and hardware to your current environment -- as and when you need to grow. With a virtual network, you no longer need to plan for huge budgets to implement that complete overhaul of your IT infrastructure!
Background of Virtualization
Virtualization first came on the scene in the sixties with the coining of the term "time sharing." Around that same time, IBM Watson Research Center started a project called the M44/44X Project. The work involved testing this "time sharing" concept where virtual machines (44X) were created to image the main machine, the IBM 7044 (M44). Soon after came the virtual machine monitor (VMM) giving the ability to create multiple virtual machines, each instance capable of running its own operating system.
Some estimates say servers typically operate between 15% and 25% of CPU capacity. With virtualization, that could be improved dramatically, up to 80%.
It doesn't take an accountant to understand the cost savings in the process, whether getting the most from your hardware or reducing expenses in storage, space, hardware and utilities; not to mention simplified administration and increased reliability across consolidated servers and multiple operating systems.
On March 14, 2006, Red Hat announced a strategy called Integrated Virtualization, working together with AMD, Intel, Network Appliance and XenSource, as well as actively collaborating with the open source community. This goal is to create a virtualization environment and simplify deployment for customers.
Checking CPU Support
To run full virtualization guests on systems with Hardware-assisted Virtual Machine (HVM), Intel, or AMD platforms, you must check to ensure your CPUs have the capabilities needed to do so.
To check if you have the CPU flags for Intel support, enter the following:
grep vmx /proc/cpuinfo
To check if you have the CPU flags for AMD support, enter the following:
grep svm /proc/cpuinfo
