>> Virtualization. The idea about
virtualization is we can have
a single physical machine that
is virtually divided into individual systems with
individual operating systems with
individual functions and so on.
Virtualization is about isolation.
I'll give you an example, back with
DOS stories from the '80s and '90s.
When we had DOS,
we had applications that wanted to run in DOS.
A developer designs an app,
often a specific operating system,
so when Windows 95 came out,
we invested in all these applications
that didn't want to run on Windows 5.
What the developer of Windows 95 does,
is he created a new operating system called
DOS virtual machine, or a DVM.
The DOS applications run within that virtual machine,
were able to function while we still took
advantage of other features of Windows.
Virtualization is nothing new.
It's been around for a long time.
But of course, as we're seeing it now,
we're really extending beyond that.
Virtualization came out of
that time period when we had a lot
of apps that we were very specific
>> to operating systems.
>> I remember back at home,
I had a Windows 98 and I wanted
to upgrade it to Windows 2000.
I was teaching a class on 2000
so I wanted to get a lot of hands-on practice with it.
I installed Windows 2000
and all of a sudden my printer would not work.
I just dropped a lot of money on
this printer, like 500 bucks.
Five hundred bucks is a lot of money even today.
What happened is, because there
wasn't a driver for Windows 2000,
if I wanted to print I had set up a dual boot system.
I had go back and reinstall Windows 98,
then I had to re-install Windows 2000 and set it up
as a dual boot so that every time I turn on my system,
I'll get a startup menu.
Would you like to load Windows 98?
Would you like to load Windows 2000?
What I actually did is I loaded
>> Windows 2000 every time,
>> and then if I wanted to print,
I had to save the file and
reboot into Windows 98, so I could print.
Clearly, not the most efficient.
But now we have tools like
Hypervisor with Microsoft Virtual PC,
Oracle's VBox, we have all sorts of alternatives.
This is much easier.
Rather than having to reboot,
I can open up a system that's running
specifically Linux-based applications,
another system that's running
iOS and I have a lot of flexibility on
the same system with a single boot to have
the variation from operating
>> system to operating system.
>> Because of the isolations
provided with virtual machines,
this is great in lab environment.
I've software when a test out and see how
it's going to work on a specific system,
I'd never load that into a production environment,
but I have this great little environment
where I can test software and mess around with it.
Another beautiful thing about
virtualization is snapshots.
We've always been able to backup and restore our data,
then as the operating systems
throughout the years have evolved,
we can do complete computer resource.
But the problem with that is that
it always takes some time.
If I could take a snapshot of
my virtual machine, make whatever changes,
and later discover those changes don't work,
it's very quick and very easy
to revert back to a previous snapshot.
Yes, virtualization solves a lot of problems,
it makes a lot of elements much easier to do.
But we still have a tax that are targeted at VMs.
We have to make sure we don't look at
virtualization as the key to all problems.
We said one of the big elements is great.
Instead of having 17 different servers,
I can go down to five.
This is what we did at the Foreign
Service Institute when I worked there.
We had 17 servers,
we moved things down to a virtualized environment
and reduce them to five.
It took up less space,
costs less money to heat and cool,
and it was a really good situation.
We had more room in our server room.
Great. But the problem then was that we had
multiple critical services running
on a single physical machine,
meaning that we can never
underestimate the likelihood of these systems going
down and not just taking down
one service but taking down many.
We have to think about physical security.
We have to think about physical performance because
one system scan takes down a lot of services.
We also have to think about things like
multi-leniency and virtualization is
really what makes the Cloud work.
It wouldn't be profitable to Google or
Microsoft if they had
detected hardware for every customer.
I want hard drive space,
they have what I need, and they sell it to me.
That's not profitable. Of course,
what the major cloud service providers do,
is they take these massive systems
with lots of capabilities,
divvy it up, and essentially
sell virtualized environments.
The problem with that is that many hosts or
organizations are sharing the same physical equipment.
We call that multi-leniency.
Anytime I have another organization that I know nothing
about on the same physical machine
as my resources I have,
I want to protect, that gives cause for concern.
We can't say any virtualization solves every problem.
We have to be very mindful.
One of the things we'll talk about in
the next slide is the Hypervisor.
The security of our virtual machine has
to start with the security of the Hypervisor.
Another nice feature that comes with
virtualization is the virtual desktop infrastructure.
The way this works, is we start out with a master image.
That is sometimes called the golden image because it's
configured exactly how we want it. It's our baseline.
This is our image with
an operating system, all the applications,
the security modifications, whatever we want,
and we save that as a golden image.
The Virtual Desktop boots off
that image and executes it in that image,
and the beauty of this is even though they
can make changes while they're logged on,
all the changes are reverted within system reboots.
This keeps users from storing
files places that they shouldn't.
It keeps them from cluttering up their desktop.
Keeps them from making some of the mistakes
that users do and this gives
me as an administrator really
great control over the baseline systems.
Do what you want to while you're logged
in but next time you reboot,
you go back to the golden image.
Another implementation of virtualization
is the virtualizing applications.
The idea here is I might have
multiple applications that conflict with each other.
Maybe I need to run Office
2016 and Office 2020 on the same system.
Now, if you install both of those,
Office 2020 is going to
overwrite some of the files in 2016,
and 2016 isn't going to work right.
What I can do is use application virtualization.
This is ultimately where a package is
created based on the application,
and it's installed on the server.
Now as a client, when I access that application
it's running on the server as
opposed to on my local machine.
This is a lot like software as a service,
this is a lot like terminal services if you use
that back in the day, and ultimately,
that keeps me from having to install
this application on my local system
where I might have conflicts.
We refer to that as software virtualization.
Microsoft has a product called
App V that'll help with this.