Virtualisation is game changer in the world of technology. This has gotten to the point where it is invincible and becoming super powerful over time and seems like there is no barrier to what could impede this growth. Of course, other than the hardware factors.
Virtual reality vs virtualisation
Virtualisation is quite different than most of people think it is. They often think of probably interacting with other virtual beings in the metaverse or gaming the hell out of that VR headset. The virtual reality is not virtualisation. Assuming you already know what virtualisation is, this article focuses on the type of virtualisation, server-side virtualisation.
Server-side virtualisation at this point, almost taken majority portion of the server-side computing due to its tremendous flexibility, cost effectiveness and other benefits that levitate business to the next level. Most of the web and e-mail server that we access regularly, are virtualized. Like any other new technology out there, lot of people working on the whole virtualisation technology continuously to take it the next level and updating it over time.
Bare-metal hypervisor
Why is it called bare-metal hypervisor? This is called bare-metal since there is no other software between the hypervisor and hardware other than the bare metal. Ya?
There are also industry standards for these bare metals. Like Type -1 and Type-2. Type 1 is referred to the hypervisor and type-2 is referred to the VMWare Workstation and such applications.
Type-1 is basically, the hardware interacting directly with hypervisor controlling other virtual machines installed. Type-2 is where hardware has a dedicated operating system, which intermediates between hardware and the supervisor and super visor interacts with hypervisor and their respective virtual machines.
It was in 2001 when VMware introduced the bare-metal hypervisor, which was originally called ESX that got rid of the unnecessary overhead of an operating system. ESX then been updated with ESXi in VMware’s product lineup. ESXi is a hypervisor so powerful, that it eradicates the need for a host operating system on a physical box.
This in turn, turns the machine into a monster machine running multiple virtual machines. ESXi is nothing crazy but a tiny operating system/ hypervisor that is often installed on something else other than a hard drive. As a matter of fact, you won’t be managing a single VM at the ESXi server itself since almost everything is done through a web interface.
Hypervisor advantages
One of the cool things is since you do not necessarily need an intermediate host operating system, you can run hypervisor straight from the flash memory. This enables the host to dedicate all of its available disk space to a VM storage as well as cuts out the disks altogether and keep its VMs on specialized devices that can consolidate many drives into a single system providing storage services to as many hosts as it can afford. This alone, significantly boost the performance. Since all of the drives are in the same place, this makes it tremendously easy to maintain, administered and backed up drives.
You can simply load a copy of ESXi straight off the thumb drive in a machine. In a short order, a rudimentary interface appears where you can input the necessary information like a master password and a static IP address. The size of the ESXi may get to you like “Really?”. Yes. This is incredibly poweful since it has only one job, which is to host virtual machines. ESXi is extremely powerful bare-metal hypervisor.
If you really want to have a taste of the virtualisation to its max, you got to get a handle on how it tremendously increases the flexibility as the scale of the operation goes up. If we take a step back and speak in terms of money, one of the great things money teaches us is, it gives us a common, divisible units. Which we can exchange for the goods and service we get and provide. When we do not have money, we need to trade goods and services to get it. But what about the time we did not have money? Goods and services were exchanged with other goods and services.
Now, if a host provider has two physical servers, he uses one server to host an important site to its intranet. In this case, the full potential of the machine is almost gone unused. But if the provider installs a hypervisor on each of the machines, he or she would be taking a leap forward using his servers in a new and more productive way. With this approach a fraction of the machine will be used therefore no other parts will be consumed by other power hungry thing like an operating system.