In the cloud, everything begins with virtualization.
The underlying capabilities of virtualization means
that the resource pools of storage, compute,
and networking are going to be made available to multiple tenants who
have really no idea who may actually be consuming services from the same
systems that represent additional customers.
When we think about virtualization mechanisms in the cloud,
the hypervisor is the underlying capability that allows
for that virtualization to take place.
There have traditionally been two types of hypervisors.
The first hypervisor on the scene was called a Type 2 hypervisor.
The Type 2 hypervisor is also known as a hosted hypervisor and the fact
that it's a traditional operating system that may actually have an
application that is emulating another operating system.
This one has been around for many decades.
The Type 1 hypervisor is the cloud hypervisor, the modern day
hypervisor, that fuels consumption of cloud services.
If you were to look more carefully at the Type 1 hypervisor,
another way of calling it out is bare metal, or embedded, or native.
Why is it called bare metal?
Because it actually gets installed directly on the hardware.
In some cases, it actually can be installed within firmware.
It is a small form factor control of the underlying resources,
the compute, the network, and the storage, without the overhead
of a traditional operating system doing many other things. Its
only focus is to serve up resources.
If we were to make a comparison of the traditional operating system, you could
see quite simply that the center of the traditional OS would be its kernel.
With a Type 1 hypervisor, it is actually the hypervisor that's at the center
of attention that can serve up additional services and can have an operating
system exists on top of it.
The first service that we'll consider that is served up by the
hypervisor will be networking. Join me over in the next clip,
and let's take a closer look.