How Cloud Computing is different from Virtualization

The tutorial covers the difference between cloud vs Virtualization concepts. The blog is useful for both beginners and professional.

The cloud and virtualization terms are used in the Cloud Environment and looks to be similar but they have different perspectives. The cloud is the Cloud computing environment which is comprises of different cloud types ( private cloud, public cloud , hybrid cloud) and provides various service models as IaaS ( Infrastructure as a service), PaaS (Platform as a service) ,SaaS (Software as a service). For more details , refer the blog Cloud Computing Tutorial – Overview & Features

Virtualization is the technology through which multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources are shared from a single physical hardware. The Virtualization is achieved by using virtualization software like HyperVisor which is layered on Physical Hardware, helps in abstracting the required machine resources and map these resource to the Virtual Environments called Virtual Machines. The HyperVisor are classified into below 2 types:

  • HyperVisor Type1 ( also known as bare metal or native hypervisor) which acts like a lightweight operating system and runs directly on the host’s hardware. The hypervisor passes through the operating system layer for each respective communication with the Hardware and thus has high latency.
  • HyperVisor Type2 ( also known as hosted hypervisor) which runs as a software on top of the operating system. The hosted hypervisors are also called as client hypervisor as they are mostly used for end users and software testing providing low latency.
Cloud Virtualization Diagram

How Hypervisor provide Virtual Environments

  • HyperVisor is the Virtualization software which helps in creating and running virtual enviornments
  • HyperVisor helps in isolating the operating system and resources and makes it available for creating virtual machines
  • The Physical harware with Hypervisor layed on it is called as the Host
  • The Virtual machines(VMs) using the Hypervisor resources are called as guests
  • The HyperVisor maintains the pool for resources like CPU, memory and storage devices
  • The pool can be accessed by the existing Virtual machines or new Virtual machines
  • The HyperVisor also utilises other operating system components like process scheduler, I/O stack, device drivers, memory manager, security manager, etc..
  • Hypevisor allows to run multiple operating systems like Windows , Linux , Ubuntu and can still manages to share it with the Virtual machines.
  • Virtualization Software examples: VMware, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V are few popular and commonly used Virtualization Software.
Cloud Computing Virtualization
The cloud is the Cloud computing environment which is comprises of different cloud types and cloud service models provided to the user as a service to be
accessed via internet connection.
Virtualization is the technology through which multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources are shared from a single physical hardware
Methodology basedTechnology based
Provides resources as a service to the users for a
specific purpose
Provides pool of resources like CPU, memory, storage by creating virtual machines for various operations
Template based configuration is supportedImage based configuration is supported
Cloud computing is user need basis and could be from few month to years.It is considered to be supported a long term process to support operations
Cloud Computing Cost:
Private cloud: High CAPEX, low OPEX
Public cloud: Low CAPEX, high OPEX
Virtualization cost:
High capital expenditures (CAPEX),
low operating expenses (OPEX)
Scale outCan be scaled up easily
maintains stateless workoadsmaintians stateful workloads
Comparison between Cloud Computing and Virtualization

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