Virtualization

In some aspects, virtualization really helps us out a lot. It became hugely popular back in the mid 2000s, like 2005. Now, we had virtualization for a long time — it's nothing new, we've had it for a really long time — but it became very popular because there are so many benefits to it, and they really made it so it's very easy to virtualize a lot of the stuff that we were normally putting on bare metal.

What virtualization is

Virtualization is just the virtual representation of a server, storage, network, or other physical machines. Let's say we're working with a piece of hardware. Maybe it's a server, maybe it's a switch or router or firewall, some sort of networking device. Whatever the case may be, we have some sort of hardware component to it. On top of that, we install software. A lot of times this software is what's known as an operating system, or perhaps it's some sort of firmware. But this gives instructions to that hardware on how to perform. It interacts with that hardware; it tells that hardware what to do.

Virtualization creates a whole other layer to this. We have this abstraction layer in between the software and the hardware. Now the software thinks that it's talking to the hardware directly, but instead it's actually talking to this abstraction layer, and then the abstraction layer makes the calls to the hardware itself. This isn't a hard and steadfast rule — there are different configurations — but in essence this is what virtualization is.

Advantages

There are actually many advantages to doing this. One of those advantages is that now the software, since it thinks it's talking directly to the hardware, we can turn up multiple instances of that. So in this case right here, we have two instances that are running that think they're talking to the hardware, but we have this abstraction layer that they're actually talking to, which is making the calls for those two pieces of software to the hardware.

So what are the advantages of this? For one, there is potential for a lot of cost savings, so it can be very cost effective to do this. Not always, but a lot of times there is.

It also makes for a very easy deployment. The initial deployment is a little more difficult, because we have to deploy that virtualization, that abstraction layer. But after we've done that, any other instance that we turn up is very quick and easy to deploy, making it very scalable. Also, we can turn up multiple instances of something, so we can make things very resilient with this model.

There's also simplified management. This is great for large-scale operations, because we can turn up things very quickly and easily, and we can scale very fast.

It also allows us to have a very diverse set of operating systems. We're not stuck on any one platform. We can turn up Linux machines, we can turn up Macs or Apple machines, we can turn up Windows machines. There's a lot of different operating systems we can turn up without creating a bunch of extra hardware to do that.

Where we see virtualization

Where do we see virtualization happening? We see it in virtual machines. We can set up servers this way, so there's server virtualization; there's desktop virtualization. We can set up whole infrastructures with this — when we set up desktop infrastructure like this, we call it virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI. We can set up storage this way. We can set up applications this way. We can set up software-defined networking, so networking this way, or along a similar note, we have software-defined WAN, or SD-WAN.

So we can virtualize really a lot of aspects to this. Each one of these looks a little different, but essentially the concept is the same, where we're removing it with this abstraction layer.