Cloud Computing

Course code : COM421 .

Cloud enabling technologies: Virtualization
Lesson outcomes
• Virtualization basics
• Distinguish the various types of server virtualization.
• Distinguish containerization from virtualization.

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Introduction
● Data centers consist of both physical and virtualized IT resources.
● The physical IT resource layer refers to the facility infrastructure that
houses computing/networking systems and equipment, together with
hardware systems and their operating systems.

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Virtualization technology (cont’d)
● “Virtualization, in computing, refers to the act of creating a virtual (rather
than actual) version of something, including but not limited to a virtual
computer hardware platform, operating system (OS), storage device, or
computer network resources.” from Wikipedia

● The resource abstraction and control of the virtualization layer is comprised

of operational and management tools that are often based on virtualization
platforms that abstract the physical computing and networking IT resources
as virtualized components that are easier to allocate, operate, release,
monitor, and control. 4
Virtualization technology Motivation
Three fundamental abstractions are necessary to describe the
operation of a computing systems:
(1) interpreters/processors, (2) memory, (3) communications
links
As the scale of a system and the size of its users grows, it
becomes very challenging to manage its resourses.
Resource management issues:
▪ provision for peak demands 🡪 overprovisioning
▪ heterogeneity of hardware and software
▪ machine failures
Virtualization is a basic enabler of Cloud Computing, it 5

simplifies the management of physical resources for the three

abstractions
Virtualization technology Motivation

● For example, the state of a virtual machine (VM) running

under a virtual machine monitor (VMM) can be saved and
migrated to another server to balance the load

● Virtualization allows users to operate in environments

they are familiar with, rather than forcing them to specific
ones

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Virtualization technology (cont’d)
● Virtualization is the process of converting a physical IT resource into a
virtual IT resource.
● Most types of IT resources can be virtualized, including:
Servers – A physical server can be abstracted into a virtual server.
Storage – A physical storage device can be abstracted into a virtual
storage device or a virtual disk.
Network – Physical routers and switches can be abstracted into logical
network fabrics, such as VLANs.
Power – A physical UPS and power distribution units can be abstracted
into what are commonly referred to as virtual UPSs.
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Virtualization - Simulation
Virtualization simulates the interface to a physical object by:
▪ Multiplexing: creates multiple virtual objects from one instance
of a physical object. Many virtual objects to one physical.
Example - a processor is multiplexed among a number of
processes or threads.
▪ Aggregation: creates one virtual object from multiple physical
objects. One virtual object to many physical objects. Example - a
number of physical disks are aggregated into a RAID disk.
▪ Emulation: constructs a virtual object of a certain type from a
different type of a physical object. Example - a physical disk 8
emulates a Random Access Memory (RAM).
 History of Virtualization
▪1960’s, IBM: CP/CMS control program: a virtual machine operating system
for the IBM System/360 Model 67
▪ 1974: Popek and Golberg from UCLA published “Formal Requirements for
Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures” where they listed the
conditions a computer architecture should satisfy to support virtualization
efficiently. The popular x86 architecture that originated in the 1970s did not
support these requirements for decades.
▪ 1990’s, Stanford researchers, VMware: Researchers developed a new
hypervisor and founded VMware, the biggest virtualization company of
today’s. First virtualization solution was is 1999 for x86.
▪ Today many virtualization solutions: Xen from Cambridge, KVM, Hyper-V, …
▪ IBM was the first to produce and sell virtualization for the mainframe. But,
VMware popularized virtualization for the masses. 9
Virtualization technology (cont’d)
● Server Virtualization
○ Virtualization software runs on a physical server called a
host or physical host, whose underlying hardware is made
accessible by the virtualization software.
○ The terms virtual server and virtual machine (VM) are used
synonymously.

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Virtualization technology (cont’d)
● Server Virtualization
○ The virtualization software functionality encompasses
system services that are specifically related to virtual
machine management and not normally found on standard
operating systems.
○ This is why this software is sometimes referred to as a
virtual machine manager or a virtual machine monitor
(VMM), but most commonly known as a hypervisor.
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Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM / Hypervisor)
● A virtual machine monitor (VMM/hypervisor)
partitions the resources of computer system into one or
more virtual machines (VMs). Allows several operating
systems to run concurrently on a single hardware
platform
● VM – an isolated environment that appears to be a whole
computer, but actually only has access to a portion of the
computer resources. It runs an OS
○backward compatibility with the original system
○Enforces isolation among the systems, thus security
A guest operating system is an OS that runs in a VM
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under the control of the VMM.
Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM / Hypervisor)
A VMM allows:
• Multiple services to share the same platform
• Live migration
• the movement of a server from one platform to another
• System modification while maintaining

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VMM Virtualizes the CPU and the Memory
● Traps the privileged instructions executed by a guest OS and
enforces the correctness and safety of the operation
● Traps interrupts and dispatches them to the individual guest
operating systems
● Controls the virtual memory management
● Maintains a shadow page table for each guest OS and replicates any
modification made by the guest OS in its own shadow page table.
● Monitors the system performance and takes corrective actions to
avoid performance degradation. For example, the VMM may swap
out a VM to avoid thrashing.

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 Type 1 and 2 Hypervisors
Type 1 Type 2
Hypervisor Hypervisor

▪ Taxonomy of VMMs:
1. Type 1 Hypervisor (bare metal, native): supports multiple virtual
machines and runs directly on the hardware (e.g., VMware ESX , Xen, 15

Denali)
2. Type 2 Hypervisor (hosted) VM - runs under a host operating system
Examples of
Hypervisors

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Virtualization technology (cont’d) - Advantages
● Server Virtualization (cont’d)
● Virtualization software offers the advantage of hardware
independence, server consolidation and resource replication.

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Virtualization technology Advantages
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○Hardware independence
■ In a non-virtualized environment, the operating system system is configured for specific hardware
models and requires reconfiguration if these IT resources need to be modified.
■ Virtualization is a conversion process that translates unique IT hardware into emulated and
standardized software-based copies.

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Virtualization technology
Advantages
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○Hardware independence (cont’d)
■ Through hardware independence, virtual servers can easily be moved to another virtualization host,
automatically resolving multiple hardware-software incompatibility issues.
■ As a result, cloning and manipulating virtual IT resources is much easier than duplicating physical
hardware.

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Virtualization technology
Advantages
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○Server consolidation
■ Virtualization technology enables different virtual servers to share one physical server.
■ This process is called server consolidation and is commonly used to increase hardware utilization,
load balancing, and optimization of available IT resources.

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Virtualization technology
Advantages
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○Server consolidation (cont’d)
■ The resulting flexibility is such that different virtual servers can run different guest operating
systems on the same host.
■ This fundamental capability directly supports common cloud features, such as on-demand usage,
resource pooling, elasticity, scalability, and resiliency.

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Virtualization technology
Advantages
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○Resource replication
■ Virtual servers are created as virtual disk images that contain binary file copies of hard disk content.
■ These virtual disk images are accessible to the host’s operating system, meaning simple file
operations, such as copy, move, and paste, can be used to replicate, migrate, and back up the virtual
server.

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Virtualization technology
Advantages
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○ Resource replication
■ This ease of manipulation and replication is one of the most salient
features of virtualization technology as it enables
● the creation of standardized virtual machines
● increased agility in the migration and deployment of a virtual machine’s new instances by being able to
rapidly scale out and up,
● the ability to roll back, which is the instantaneous creation of VM snapshots by saving the state of the
virtual server’s memory and hard disk image to a host-based file;
● the support of business continuity with efficient backup and restoration procedures, as well as the
creation of multiple instances of critical IT resources and applications.
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Virtualization technology
Types
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○Two types of server virtualization: Operating System-Based
Virtualization and Hardware-based Virtualization

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Virtualization technology
Types
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○ Operating System-Based Virtualization

The different logical layers of operating system-based 25

virtualization, in which the VMM is first installed into a full host operating system and
subsequently used to generate virtual machines
Virtualization technology
Types
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○ Hardware-Based Virtualization

The different logical layers of hardware-based 26

virtualization, which does not require another host

operating system.
Virtualization technology
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○ Many administrative tasks can be performed more easily using virtual servers as opposed
to using their physical counterparts.
○ Virtualized IT resource management is often supported by virtualization infrastructure
management (VIM) tools that collectively manage virtual IT resources and rely on a
centralized management module, otherwise known as a controller, that runs on a dedicated
computer.

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Virtualization technology (cont’d)
●Server Virtualization (cont’d)
○ Much as server virtualization has advantages, it may not be ideal for complex systems that
have high workloads with little use for resource sharing and replication.
○ It is also important to note that many hardware vendors that distribute specialized
hardware may not have device driver versions that are compatible with virtualization
software.
○ Conversely, the software itself may be incompatible with recently released hardware
versions.
○ These types of incompatibility issues can be resolved using established commodity
hardware platforms and mature virtualization products.

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Containerization
●Containerization is an operating system-level virtualization technology used to
deploy and run applications and cloud services without the need to deploy a
virtual server for each solution.
●Using containers enables multiple isolated cloud services to run on a single
physical server or virtual server while accessing the same operating system
kernel (the next slide shows differences in app deployment in three
environments).

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Containerization (cont’d)

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Differences in app deployment in three environments

Containerization (cont’d)
●The key component of container architecture is the container
engine, also referred to as the containerization engine.
○The container engine is specialized software that is deployed in
an operating system to abstract the required resources and
enable the definition and deployment of containers.

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Containerization (cont’d)
●Multiple containers can be deployed in a logical construct called a pod.
●A pod is a group of one or more containers that have shared storage and/or
network resources, and also share the same configuration that determines how
the containers are to be run.
●A pod is typically employed when there are different cloud services that are
part of the same application or namespace and that need to run under a single
IP address.

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Containerization (cont’d)
●Containerization is different from virtualization (see illustration on next slide)

●Containerization evolved from a Linux feature known as cgroups. It’s a feature

for isolating and controlling resource usage for an operating system process.
●Forexample, it defines the amount of CPU and RAM or the number of threads that a
process can entitle to access within the Linux kernel. cgroups later became Linux
Containers (LXC) with more advanced features for namespace isolation of
components, such as routing tables and file systems.

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⮚ So all containers run on the minimal, resource-isolated process that others can’t
access.
Containerization (cont’d)

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Virtualization vs containerization
Containerization (cont’d)
●Portability is one of the key benefits of containers, allowing cloud resource
administrators to move containers to any environment that shares the same host
operating system and container engine that the container is hosted on, and
without the need to change the application or software (which would normally
require changes to the source code).

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Conclusion
●Virtualization is the process of converting a physical IT resource into a virtual
IT resource.
●Operating system-based server virtualization is the installation of virtualization
software in a pre-existing operating system, which is called the host operating
system.
●Hardware-based virtualization represents the installation of virtualization
software directly on the physical host hardware so as to bypass the host
operating system, which is presumably engaged with operating system-based
virtualization.
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References & further reading
●Shroff, G. (2010). Enterprise Cloud Computing: Technology, Architecture and
Applications. Cambridge University Press.
●Monk, E., Wagner, B. (2013). Concepts in Enterprise Resource Planning, 4th
Edition. Cengage Learning
●Earl, T., Puttini, R. (2013). Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology
Architecture. ServiceTech Press.

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Thank you

THE END.