Virtualization using KVM and XEN
Virtualization is a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with available resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources, or it can include making multiple physical resources appear as a single logical resource
This is the prominent feature of IT in today's world as it not only decrease your hardware cost but helps you to increase your space utilization efficiency.
Here are some more benefits of Virtualization:
- Lower number of physical servers - you can reduce hardware maintenance costs because of a lower number of physical servers.
- By implementing a server consolidation strategy, you can increase the space utilization efficiency in your data center.
- By having each application within its own "virtual server" you can prevent one application from impacting another application when upgrades or changes are made.
- Memory or any other hardware management of Guest server from single Host server.
- You can deploy multiple operating system technologies on a single hardware platform .
At Techblue Software, we work on the two most used hypervisor i.e Kvm and Xen.
KVM supports mainline linux kernel that means your host OS has to be Linux but it supports Linux, Windows, Solaris and BSD as guests. It supports both x86 and x86-64 systems with hardware supporting virtualization extensions. It supports full virtualization.
On the other hand XEN supports only paravirtualization only. XEN re-uses existing device drivers (both closed and open source) from Linux, making device management easy. Moreover XEN is robust to device driver failure and protects both guests and the hypervisor from faulty or malicious drivers.