Types of Virtualization Technology-

Advantages vs. Disadvantages

January 3, 2014 by wing Leave a Comment

Virtualization helps to integrate several servers into a  physical server in such

a way that every server appears  as a standalone server to the users. The three
types of  popular server virtualizations are OS virtualization, hardware
emulation and paravirtualization.

Operating system virtualization

Operating system virtualization helps to create virtualized layer of software
on the top of host operating system that resides above the hardware layer.
Unlike other virtualization, they create an OS interfaces for applications to
run, giving the feeling of a complete OS for the applications. Each virtualized
environment has its own file system, system libraries, process tables and
network configuration. Since they create a self-contained environment, they
are also known as “container”. Therefore, creating the software emulation of
an entire OS in a physical server is the essence of OS virtualization.
Disadvantage of OS virtualization

They support only one operating system as base and guest OS in a single
server. You have to choose a single OS  such as either Windows and Linux.
All the OS in the container should be same version and should have same
patch level of the base OS. If the base OS crash, all the virtual container
become unavailable.

Advantages of OS virtualization

Since OS virtualization provide least overhead among all types of

virtualization solution, they offer highest performance and highest density of
virtual environment.

Application

They are great for isolating applications, web hosting and training. Popular
OS virtualized products are OpenVZ and Virtuozzo.

Hardware emulator
In hardware emulation, a specialized software, which is also known as
hypervisor, creates hardware emulation for OS in a single server. They can
host different types of OS in a single server. The OS loaded into each virtual
machine works as a standalone and unmodified OS. When a VM (virtual
machine) is running, the hypervisor make changes to the part of the OS that
make system calls. Hypervisor changes the  OS  by entering a piece of code
—which is known as binary translation- to the OS when it is running.  Binary
translation takes place in four parts of the OS ( memory, processor, network,
storage) that interact with the hardware.

Product: VMware utilizes hypervisor technology to their products.

Advantage
You do not have to modify the OS and applications to run on the virtual
environment.

Types of hypervisor

The two classes of hypervisor are: type 1 and type 2. Type 1 hypervisor is
also known as bare-metal implementation because they sit directly on the top
of hardware, without needing any operating system. Since they can directly
communicate with hardware resources, they are much faster than type 2
hypervisor.

Advantage of type 1: if a single virtual machine crash, it does not affect the
rest of the guest operation system. Therefore, they are considered more
secure than type 2. Since they generate less overhead, type 1 hypervisor is
much faster than its counterpart.

Type 1 Products: include VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, and

the many Xen variants.
Type 2 hypervisor resides on top of the operating system. Since they cannot
directly communicate with the hardware, they are less efficient than the type
1.

Advantage of type 2: in type 2 hypervisor, the OS takes care of all the
hardware. That is why a  type 2 hypervisor can support a wide range of
hardware. Besides, installing a type 2 is much easier than that of  type 1.

Disadvantage of type 2: they have more points of failure since anything that
affect the stability of the base operating system can also affect the guest OS
and the virtual machine. When the base OS needs a reboot, all the VM will
also be rebooted.

Example of type 2 hypervisor VMware Player, VMware Workstation, and

Microsoft Virtual Server .

Paravirtualization
Unlike hardware emulation, paravirtualization does not emulate hardware
environment in software, instead it coordinates or multiplexes access to
hardware resources in favor of virtual machine.

Example: Xen open source virtualization software.

In paravirtualized environment, a guest OS( called DomainU) is directly

installed on the hypervisor(bare-metal architecture) that does not contain any
device drivers for network and  storage. Instead a privileged guest OS-also
known as DomainO-has direct access to hardware. All guest OSes access
hardware resources via DomainO). When a guest OS(virtual machine) needs
to access hardware resources it sends a message to DomianO that access the
hardware on behalf of guest OS. When data returns to the hardware,
DomainO reads the information and passes it back to the guest operating
system that has request it.

DomainO is a standard OS such as Linux that has been modified to

communicate with hypervisor to control access to hardware.

Unlike hardware emulation, which has device drivers installed in the

hypervisor, paravirtualization uses device drivers of the DomainO. All the
guest operating systems have stub drivers that communicate with the stub
drivers in the privileged guest. Instead of making direct contact with the
hardware, each stub driver in the guest OS communicate with its counterpart
in the DomainO. The main benefit of having stub driver is that the hypervisor
does not have to have its own device drivers. Therefore, the users of the
virtual machine never have to depend on  the hypervisor software
provider for driver software. Faster run time translation for system calls is
the second benefit of this approach of device driver.

The major drawback of paravirtualization is the requirement of modifying

guest operating system to execute and communicate with the hypervisor. You
must modify the kernel of the guest OS before installation.
Since, it is not possible to modify the kernel of proprietary OS like Windows,
paravirtualization software users ( such as Xen users) have to use open source
OS like Linux or OpenSolaris.

Virtualization type Remarks Products

Operating system It creates an abstracted view of the OS including root OpenVZ, Virtuozzo,

virtualization file system, process table etc. They are suitable for Sun Solaris

homogeneous OS environment where consistent OS

version is necessary.

Hardware emulation It Gives abstracted view of underlying hardware, VMware VMserver,

offering support for heterogeneous OS.This is a VMware ESX,

market leading virtualization technology. Microsoft virtual

server

paravirtualization It multiplexes the access to hardware resources, offers Xen( open source)

high performance, requires guest OS modification

before deployment.More complex than hardware

emulation

Application of virtualization

1. For development and testing systems and applications

2. Educational training
 3. Server consolidation
4. Failover or high availability
5. Server load balancing
6. Server pooling
7. Disaster recovery

Server consolidation means creating a union of physically separated servers.

In the world of virtualization, consolidation means refers to taking several
separate server instances and migrate them into a virtual machine running in
a single server.

Having a clear understating on various types of virtualization technology

helps IT professional to select the right virtualization solutions for the
organization. So, before buying any virtualized products, you can consider
testing open source virtual server solution such as Xen (though Xen
commercial offerings known as Xen Citrix) that can give cost advantages to
your business.