There exist multiple technologies that can be employed to aid organizations in expanding capacities, managing systems, while also aiding in the optimization of their system. These technologies are often diverse in their functioning and offer myriads of advantages when used. Often companies that integrate these technologies into their operations often end up being efficient as well as effective. One such technology includes the hypervisor or the virtual machine monitor (VMM) that develops as well as runs virtual machines.
A hypervisor can be described as the hardware virtualization technique that functions to enable multiple guest operating systems (OS) run at the same time on a single host system (Kelbley, Sterling & Stewart, 2011). In this context, the guest OS works to share the host computer hardware in a manner that each of the OS appears to own its processor, memory as well as other related hardware resources. In retrospect, the hypervisor is installed on the hardware of a server to control the guest operating system which runs on the host machine. The main function of the hypervisor in this regard is to take care of the needs of the given guest operating system while adequately managing it in a way that instances of regarding multiple operating systems cannot interfere with each other.
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There are two types of hypervisors. The first type is referred to as the native or the bare-metal hypervisors. The native hypervisor runs directly on the existing hardware of the host computer, thus functioning to control the resources of the hardware while also managing the guest operating systems. Some examples of the native hypervisor include the Citrix XenServer, VMware ESXi as well as the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor (Sitaram & Manjunath, 2012). The second type of the hypervisor is the hosted hypervisor, which runs on the environment of a formal operating system. This type of hypervisor operates as the distinct second layer as the operating system runs in a third layer position above the hardware.
A hypervisor is a key component that enables the possibility of virtual machines. It is the component that one needs to add to transform a single machine into multiple virtual machines that can then be used with various types of applications (Kelbley, Sterling & Stewart, 2011). It operates to put down a layer that goes on to separate the various types of software environments as well as the host hardware to make sure that issues concerning interoperability are never encountered.
Hypervisors from the description above are used to offer full virtualization. This, in essence, is a virtualization technique that is employed to offer a specific form of the virtual machine environment in which complete simulation regarding underlying hardware is present. In this regard, the hypervisor functions to make sure that every existing salient feature offered by hardware is reflected into among the multiple virtual machines. As such, the hypervisor effectively enables an operating system to host various OS technologies.
Various advantages can be accrued from installing hypervisor. For one, among the most common drawbacks related to server virtualization is the drop in performance as well as the increase concerning requirements for storage. Nonetheless, such issues of performance can be solved using a storage hypervisor. In this case, installing the hypervisor to intercept I/O requests just before they succeed in getting to the server. In doing this, the requests are written to a log file, then further to a pool of heterogeneous storage shared in the system. Thus, performance becomes significantly improved to almost ten times while also reducing requirements concerning storage to about 90 percent (Kelbley, Sterling & Stewart, 2011).
Another benefit that can be accrued from installing the hypervisor is that it works to allow the efficient use of hardware that enables more work related to computing performed with all being done at the same time. Home users can also benefit from the technology as it will enable them to run multiple operating systems on top of one host computer, thus ensuring the elimination of the lack of backward compatibility related to cross-platform support. Businesses can also get to maximize related budget proceeding to spend their budget on other important issues.
- Kelbley, J., Sterling, M., & Stewart, A. (2011). Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V: Insider’s Guide to Microsoft’s Hypervisor. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
- Sitaram, D., & Manjunath, G. (2012). Moving to the cloud: Developing apps in the new world of cloud computing. Waltham, MA: Syngress.
