What is virtualization (in general)?

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources In laymans terms virtualization is often: 1. The creation of many virtual resources from one physical resource. 2. The creation of one virtual resource from one or more physical resource.

2. Describe the major benefits of Server Virtualization. 1. Server consolidation By collapsing physical servers into virtual servers and reducing the number of physical servers, your company will reap a tremendous savings in power and cooling costs. Additionally, you'll be able to reduce the datacenter footprint which can include diesel generator costs, UPS costs, network switch costs, rack space and floor space. 2. Stop server sprawl Before server virtualization, admins were forced to over-provision servers to ensure that they would meet user demand. With server virtualization, there is no more over-provisioning and you'll be able to perfectly size every virtual machine. 3. Do more with less With a lagging economy, IT departments and admins are forced to do more with less. Server virtualization makes admins more efficient and agile, allowing us to do more with less and look like the heroes of the IT department. 4. Cost savings Not only will your company save on the physical server hardware, power and cooling of the servers that were consolidated, you'll also save on the time it used to take to administer physical servers. End users will be more productive thanks to less downtime and much more. 5. Moving running virtual machines Truly one of the more powerful features of server virtualization is the ability to move a running virtual machine from one host to another with no downtime. VMware's vMotion can do this for you and that feature makes other features like distributed resource scheduler (DRS) and distributed power management (DPM) possible. 6. Increased uptime Features like vMotion, storage vMotion (svMotion), DRS, and VMware high availability (VMHA) all result in virtualized servers being up and running so much more than those same servers that were running directly on physical hardware.

7. Image-based backup and restore By being able to back up and restore entire virtual machines, you can much more quickly back up the VMs and put them back, if needed. Additionally, image-level backups make disaster recovery so much easier. Even more, only changed blocks need to be backed up and backups can be done in the middle of the day thanks to snapshot technology. 8. Virtual labs By being able to create a virtual lab (a group of VMs on a private virtual network), you can test vSphere, Exchange, Active Directory and much more. Previously, this would have been cost prohibitive with physical servers. 9. Simplified disaster recovery Thanks to virtual machines being hardware-independent (not tied to a particular physical server) you can restore image-based backups on any hardware that is capable of running vSphere. Plus, software features like site recovery manager (SRM) automate the testing and failover when a disaster strikes. 10. Allow us to move to the cloud By virtualizing our servers and making them portable, we are now ready to move them to a cloud hosting company when that technology matures and when we feel comfortable with it.

3. What is the difference between hosted virtualization and hypervisor-based virtualization? A hosted architecture installs and runs the virtualization layer as an application on top of an operating system and supports the broadest range of hardware configurations BHyVe, VMware Workstation and VirtualBox are examples of Type 2 hypervisors.

In contrast, a hypervisor (bare-metal) architecture installs the virtualization layer directly on a cleanx86-based system. Since it has direct access to the hardware resources rather than going throughan operating system, a hypervisor is more efficient than a hosted architecture and delivers greaterscalability, robustness and performance. This model represents the classic implementation of virtual machine architectures; the original hypervisors were the test tool, SIMMON, and CP/CMS, both developed at IBM in the 1960s. CP/CMS was the ancestor of IBM's z/VM. Modern equivalents of this are Oracle VM Server for SPARC, Oracle VM Server for x86, the Citrix XenServer, VMware ESX/ESXi, KVM, and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. In other words, Type 1 hypervisor runs directly on the hardware; a Type 2 hypervisor runs on another operating system, such as FreeBSD, Linux, or Windows.

The classification of specific hypervisor implementations as Type 1 or Type 2 is not always clear cut. For example, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is implemented as a kernel module for Linux 2.6.20 which, when loaded, allows the Linux kernel to operate as a bare-metal (i.e., Type 1) hypervisor.[2] However, as Linux is an operating system in its own right, it is also argued that KVM is a Type 2 hypervisor.[3] Microsoft Hyper-V (released in June 2008)[4] has also been misidentified as a Type 2 hypervisor.[5] Both the free stand-alone version and the version that is part of the commercial Windows Server 2008 product use a virtualized Windows Server 2008 parent partition to manage the Type 1 Hyper-V hypervisor. In both cases the Hyper-V hypervisor loads prior to the management operating system, and any virtual environments created run directly on the hypervisor, not via the management operating system. Attempts have been made to introduce the term Type 0 (Zero) Hypervisor to differentiate specific hypervisor implementations.[6][7] However, no consensus as to the validity of this term has been reached.[8]

What is virtualization (in general)? Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources In laymans terms virtualization is often: 1. The creation of many virtual resources from one physical resource. 2. The creation of one virtual resource from one or more physical resource.

2. Describe the major benefits of Server Virtualization.

1. Server consolidation By collapsing physical servers into virtual servers and reducing the number of physical servers, your company will reap a tremendous savings in power and cooling costs. Additionally, you'll be able to reduce the datacenter footprint which can include diesel generator costs, UPS costs, network switch costs, rack space and floor space. 2. Stop server sprawl Before server virtualization, admins were forced to over-provision servers to ensure that they would meet user demand. With server virtualization, there is no more over-provisioning and you'll be able to perfectly size every virtual machine. 3. Do more with less With a lagging economy, IT departments and admins are forced to do more with less. Server virtualization makes admins more efficient and agile, allowing us to do more with less and look like the heroes of the IT department. 4. Cost savings Not only will your company save on the physical server hardware, power and cooling of the servers that were consolidated, you'll also save on the time it used to take to administer physical servers. End users will be more productive thanks to less downtime and much more. 5. Moving running virtual machines Truly one of the more powerful features of server virtualization is the ability to move a running virtual machine from one host to another with no downtime. VMware's vMotion can do this for you and that feature makes other features like distributed resource scheduler (DRS) and distributed power management (DPM) possible. 6. Increased uptime Features like vMotion, storage vMotion (svMotion), DRS, and VMware high availability (VMHA) all result in virtualized servers being up and running so much more than those same servers that were running directly on physical hardware. 7. Image-based backup and restore By being able to back up and restore entire virtual machines, you can much more quickly back up the VMs and put them back, if needed. Additionally, image-level backups make disaster recovery so much easier. Even more, only changed blocks need to be backed up and backups can be done in the middle of the day thanks to snapshot technology. 8. Virtual labs By being able to create a virtual lab (a group of VMs on a private virtual network), you can test vSphere, Exchange, Active Directory and much more. Previously, this would have been cost prohibitive with physical servers. 9. Simplified disaster recovery Thanks to virtual machines being hardware-independent (not tied to a particular physical server) you can restore image-based backups on any hardware that is capable of running vSphere. Plus,