Lab 1 : Virtualization

In this lab tutorial, we are taught about virtualization. What I personally understand about virtualization is that you create hardware emulation as a platform/environment for an operating system to be installed on. Any kind of guest software can be installed on this so-called hardware emulation, commonly referred to as a virtual machine.

The main advantage of virtualization is that you can have a certain degree of flexibility, portability and interoperability in the sense that any kind of software can be virtually compatible with any hardware environment created by this virtualization platform.

The concept of virtualization is not limited to just virtual machines. Virtual servers can now be created with virtualization software.

The term Virtual Machine is clearly defined as an efficient and isolated duplicate of a real machine. A real machine has the characteristics of having a processor, memory, network connections and peripheral ports. A virtual machine is capable of emulating a real machine that has these characteristics.

The benefits of using a virtual machine include:

• Hardware utilization due to the usage of multiple virtual machines inside a single hardware.
• The decreasing of the operating cost and capital by sharing in number of virtual machines.
• High availability of virtual machines and security.
• Virtual machines can be used from anywhere inside the intranet.

The VMware Workstation is the commercial virtualization software that is capable of creating and running multiple virtual machines at the same time. In addition to that, VMware Workstation enables the conversion of existing physical PC into a virtual machine. VMware is also capable of running Windows or Linux-based virtual machines or others on the same PC. Virtual machines can share files with each other using drag-and-drop functionality. One organization can also speed up deployment of operating systems by just cloning virtual machines as installing operating systems and applications can be time-consuming. If one desires, one may also reduce the size of virtual machines and insert them into removable storages and take them wherever he/she wants to. The preservation of a current state of a virtual machine can also be done by taking a snapshot, just in case there are any crashes or errors happening to the particular virtual machine.