Characteristics of Virtualized Environments

Virtual Reference model

Guest Virtual Image Applications Applications

Virtual Hardware Virtual Storage Virtual Networking

Virtualization Layer
Software Emulation

Host Physical Hardware Physical Storage Physical Networking

Characteristics of Virtualized
Solutions ?????
Characteristics of Virtualized
Solutions

Increased Security
The ability to control the execution of a guest in a
completely transparent manner opens new possibilities for
delivering a secure, controlled execution environment. The
virtual machine represents an emulated environment in
which the guest is executed. All the operations of the guest
are generally performed against the virtual machine, which
then translates and applies them to the host.
 Managed Execution
Virtualization of the execution environment does not
only allow increased security but a wider range of
features can be implemented. In particular, sharing,
aggregation, emulation, and isolation are the most
relevant.
 Portability
In case of hardware virtualization solution, the guest is
packaged into a virtual image, that in most of the cases,
can be safely moved and executed on the top of different
virtual machine.
TAXONOMY of virtualization Techniques
Pros and Cons of Virtualization
 Virtualization has now become extremely popular and
is largely used, especially in Cloud computing. The
primary reason of its wide success is the elimination of
technology barriers that made virtualization not an
effective and viable solution in the past. The most
relevant barrier has been performance.
Advantages of Virtualization
 Managed execution and isolation are perhaps the
most important advantages of virtualization. In the
case of techniques supporting the Creation of
virtualized execution environment, these two
characteristics allow building secure and controllable
computing environments.
 Portability is another advantage of virtualization,
especially for execution virtualization techniques.
Virtual machine instances are normally represented by
one or more files that can be easily transported with
respect to physical systems.
Disadvantages
 Performance degradation
 Security holes and new Threats