Welcome to our latest weekly blog series, Solutions for the Cloud. This series will focus on central concepts and benefits related to the cloud and how database tools can assist in managing and monitoring your cloud environment. This week, we discuss the concepts of virtualization related to the cloud.
What is Virtualization for Cloud Computing?
With the advent of the cloud, resources are used as an aggregated virtual computer. One of the critical elements that makes the cloud work is virtualization to consolidate resources, and reduce space and energy consumption. The cloud involves three relevant concepts of virtualization: virtual machines, hypervisors, and containers.
Virtual machines represent a logical part of a physical machine. Physical machines are divided into multiple parts to allow multiple tenants to share its resources.
Hypervisors manage virtual machines. Hypervisors logically divide a physical machine into multiple virtual machines to provide platform virtualization. Hypervisors control and present the physical resources of a machine as virtual resources to the virtual machines. Hypervisors enable other software (that is, usually operating systems) to run concurrently, as though they had full access to the physical machine. Native, bare-metal, or type 1 hypervisors run directly on the physical hardware. Hosted or type 2 hypervisors require a host operating system to run.
Containers are a lightweight alternative to full hardware virtualization. Instead of the platform virtualization that hypervisors provide, containers provide operating system-level virtualization. Containers enable a single machine or virtual machine to operate multiple instances of an operating system. Each container is isolated in its operating environment within the operating system. All containers share a host operating system and kernel. However, each container maintains its process and network space.
Accessing your databases and applications in the cloud has become easy to do, with multiple options available for selection based on your specific needs. Whatever the cloud configuration, IDERA provides a wide range of database tools to help you manage and monitor your environment.
Read more in the full solution brief.
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