Virtualization been around for over a decade now but it's only been in the last few years that we really
began to see people using virtualization for all kinds of stuff.
If you haven't seen virtualization yet well let me show you one right here.
So if you take a look.
I am running a copy of Windows Server 2012.
Well actually that's not true.
Let me show you what's really taking place here.
Is I have a copy of Windows Server.
It's big screen so it's hard to see the whole thing but you can see I'm really running Windows 8.
And what's happening is I have a copy of Windows Server running underneath Windows 8.
This is virtualization virtualization simply means to virtualize everything that there is about a computer
into a virtual system.
So when we virtualize a computer what we're doing is we're taking all of the hardware the CPQ the ram
everything that is this computer and then virtualizing it within its own little system.
Virtualization is important but it's a little bit confusing for people who haven't seen it the first
time.
The idea behind virtualization is that I'm going to have some kind of host system that has real hardware
and I'm going to take that real hardware and I'm going to virtualize all that hardware so that another
virtual system within the computer can actually take advantage of it.
Virtualization is a lot different than what we call emulation.
For example I love to play old Atari 2600 games.
I'm sorry.
I love these old crazy games and I could get emulators for the PC that will emulate an Atari 2600 but
trust me there's nothing on my real high end laptop here that has any of the same hardware as that old
Atari 2600 does.
So the software pretends to be that hardware virtualization doesn't pretend to be anything that it's
not.
If you have a certain amount of RAM in this computer your virtual machine can only take that much RAM
in whatever C-p you physically have in your computer.
The virtual ICP has to be that type of CPQ.
So that's a big difference between emulation versus virtualization.
Now virtualization gives us some really big benefits.
For example we have power saving one of the big problems we run into particularly with servers is that
back in the old days you'd have to have individual machines that did all the different type of server
jobs so if you add a domain controller and then you had a web server Those were always separate machines
but they don't have to be anymore.
I can take one machine.
Now this is going to be a beefy machine.
Don't get me wrong we have a lot of Ramadan's stuff and I can put multiple virtual machines on that
one box.
And that saves us lots and lots of power.
It also gives us as part of that hardware consolidation.
We simply don't have that many machines that we have to physically take care of if we can consolidate
all these guys onto one or two or three or whatever it is number of boxes.
We get the benefit of just not having to maintain and by and just fix so many individual computers.
The other big thing is system recovery now with System Recovery.
The cool part about virtualization is that when I'm running a virtual machine when I turn that virtual
machine off it's simply saved as a file on my host computer.
So let's say I'm running my computer along and I've got a web server that's in a virtualise machine
and it gets hacked.
Well it's really not that big of a deal with virtualization in a virtualise world.
I just simply shut down that system take a backup copy of the file and fire that up and we're up and
running again.
So that also helps us in terms of duplication.
If let's say you have four or five web servers I need to build.
Well back in the old days that would be going through the installation process and setting up four or
five physical boxes with virtualization.
I could do one build which is simply a file and then drag that file over to other virtual machines and
boot those up so I can just make copies of virtual machines.
Now of course things like software licensing and stuff like that still comes into play but you do have
that duplication option.
And the last one and the reason I love virtualization more than anything else is research.
You can only imagine how many times I get people give me a phone call saying Mike you know I'm running
a Windows XP Service Pack for and you know back in the old days did we have a telnet in Windows enty
version 3.5 when all these crazy questions I get.
And back.
Not that many years ago I used to keep all these computers around running all these different versions
of operating systems just to be able to do R&D today.
I've got one very very big box but it has a couple of hundred different setups for different operating
systems in it.
And if you need me to bring up a copy of this home without any service packs I can do it very very quickly.
So from a research standpoint to be able to have a virtual machine that you could experiment and play
with makes it absolutely fantastic.
Anyway what I'm going to do now is I want to play with a couple of virtual machines to give you some
ideas of some of the power of virtualization.
So here is my windows 2012 virtual machine.
Now this is just the console.
This is just the connection to the virtual machine.
We can actually just close this and the virtual machine will still be running up but I'll just close
it like this.
The real power to all this is what we call the hypervisor.
Now the hypervisor is the thing that manages and runs the virtual machines for us.
There are two kinds of hypervisor out here.
This hypervisor in fact this is what's called Hyper-V.
It comes with Windows.
It's really very very powerful.
And this particular tool runs on top of a host operating system.
You see I'm running Windows 8.
And so this hypervisor actually runs on top of it.
Now there's another type of hypervisor.
This type of hypervisor actually boots up a system so the type of hypervisor that boots up his system.
You've seem a lot of times he leads a little pizza box systems.
I have a little US be inside the computer just boots off a little thumb drive.
And they look something.
Well I've got a picture of one something like this.
What you're looking at here is just a console screen from the anywhere's Yes X I hypervisor and you
literally boot from this and it just comes up and this is just one of a few basic screens that you see.
OK.
Anyway back to me.
So you've got two types of hyper visors so you've got hyper visors that run off a host operating system
or you have hypervisor that actually boot computers up themselves.
So you've got two different choices there.
Now there's a lot more to virtualization but these are the basic pieces.
Make sure you understand that there are two different types of hypervisor.
And also make sure you understand the benefits of virtualization.