What is the Requirement of Virtualization Platform in Implementing Cloud?

The basic infrastructure of the cloud is empowered by virtualization. It enables delivery of intricate cloud services that is easily scalable in a cost-effective manner. The cloud computing users can run virtual machines without the need to invest and maintain the hardware, bandwidth and other data center infrastructure.

Virtualization has enabled dealing with infrastructure that cannot be touched and is used to deploy the three major components of cloud computing that include Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), Platform as a Service(PaaS), and Software as a Service(SaaS).

One fundamental attribute of virtualization is the concept of partitioning. This enables supporting of multiple operating systems under one single server. This, in turn, ensures more segregation and seclusions to the machines from one another and effectively isolates them from an infected machine.

Your server is not affected even if a neighbor machine is hacked or infected with a virus. Being in an individually enclosed environment assures of enhanced security without being intruded by the other machines being served in the environment. Being housed in an encapsulated form identifies and preserves individuality from other applications.

Yet another feature of virtualization is its ability to share the hardware on the Linux and Windows operating systems. It also enables shifting of operating systems over different hardware when multiple applications are running. Virtualization has enabled the cloud to be sold as a commodity based on utility. Users can choose any platform without being locked in to any one vendor and they pay only for what they use.

Well, virtualization is the main requirement to implement cloud computing. The entire concept is based on virtually parting the resource i.e. no physical alteration but making the platform to segregate resource by itself, which is only possible if the architecture undergoes virtualization.

Requirements for virtualization

Cloud computing is unlike physical server. If you ever owned a dedicated server you would know that the resources (CPU, RAM, and hard disk) had a definite physical existence somewhere.

For example if I chose a host in India, there would be a server marked by my name, containing all the files that I upload.
Cloud servers, on the other hand, work a lot differently. Though if you see the hardware, cloud servers would look the same as any other server. However, the difference is how the service is provisioned. For cloud computing, a number of servers are pooled together. This gives a giant resource pool – consider a giant server with RAM, Storage and Processing power equal to the sum of the individual servers.

Virtualization is nothing but parting resources according to the requirement. The resources are partitioned from this giant resource pool based on your need. All this cannot be achieved without virtualization.

I am basically summarizing all the above answers in a more comprehensive way.

• Virtualization redistributes computing powers as per needs.
• Cloud is provisioned by combining server resources at once place.
• The combined resource is then distributed as per client’s demands.
• Virtualization is implemented to achieve the above step.

Virtualization is thus the main requirement to implement cloud computing.

Virtualization is very crucial for the implementation of cloud computing. It drives cloud computing technology to handle more and more accounts at a time by imitating different and more hardware. Such imitation of the hardware is capable of handling the increased security, availability, rapid deployment, etc.

The virtualization is capable enough to hide the complexity of the software or hardware. It is so much more efficient than the traditional server concept and despite all the cons must be preferred over the conventional server models. Hence, it is the key to cloud computing that makes it easy for the operating systems to remain under the umbrella of the same hardware and still make the applications run separately.