Virtualization &
Containers
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Virtualization & Containers
Virtualization & Containers :
1. Characteristics of virtualized environments
2. Taxonomy of virtualization techniques
3. Virtualization and cloud computing
4. Pros and Cons of Virtualization
5. Technology examples (XEN, VMware)
6. Building blocks of containers
7. Container platforms (LXC, Docker)
8. Container orchestration
9. Docker Swarm and Kubernetes
10. Public cloud(Amazon EC2) and container (AECS) offerings.
Virtualization & Containers
• Virtualization technology is one of the fundamental components of Cloud
computing, especially in case of infrastructure-based services.
• It allows creation of secure, customizable, and isolated execution environment
for running applications, even if they are untrusted, without affecting other
user’s applications.
• At the basis of this technology, there is the ability of a computer program—or
more in general a combination of software and hardware—to emulate an
executing environment separate from the one that hosts such program.
• For example, running Windows OS on top of virtual machine, which itself is
running on Linux OS.
• Virtualization provides a great opportunity to build elastically scalable systems,
which are capable of provisioning additional capability with minimum costs.
• Therefore, it is widely used to deliver customizable computing environment on
demand.
Virtualization & Containers
• Virtualization is a large umbrella of technologies and concepts that are
meant to provide an abstract environment—whether virtual hardware
or an operating system—to run applications.
• This term is often synonymous with hardware virtualization, which
plays a fundamental role in efficiently delivering Infrastructure-as-a-
Service solutions for Cloud computing.
• In fact, virtualization technologies have a long trail in the history of
computer science and have come into many flavors by providing
virtual environments at operating system level, programming language
level, and application level.
• Moreover, virtualization technologies not only provide a virtual
environment for executing applications, but also for storage, memory,
and networking.
Virtualization & Containers
• Since its inception, virtualization has been periodically explored and
adopted, but in the last few years, there has been a consistent and
growing trend in leveraging this technology.
• Virtualization technologies have gained a renewed interested recently
due to the confluence of different phenomena:
1. Increased Performance and Computing Capacity.
2. Underutilized Hardware and Software Resources.
3. Lack of Space.
4. Greening Initiatives.
5. Rise of Administrative Costs.
Virtualization & Containers
1. Increased Performance and Computing Capacity:
• Nowadays, the average end-user desktop PC is powerful enough to
fulfill almost all the needs of everyday computing, and there is an
extra capacity that is rarely used.
• Almost all of these PCs have resources enough to host a virtual
machine manager and execute a virtual machine with a by far
acceptable performance.
• The same consideration applies to the high-end side of the PC market,
where supercomputers can provide an immense compute power that
can accommodate the execution of hundreds or thousands of virtual
machines.
Virtualization & Containers
2. Underutilized Hardware and Software Resources.
• Hardware and software underutilization is occurring due to
(1) the increased performance and computing capacity.
(2) effect of limited or sporadic use of resources.
• Computers today are so powerful that in most cases only a fraction of their capacity is
used by an application or the system.
• Moreover, if we consider the IT infrastructure of an enterprise, there are a lot of
computers that are partially utilized, while they could have been used without
interruption on a 24/7/365 basis.
• As an example, desktop PCs mostly required by administrative staff for office
automation tasks are only used during work hours, while overnight, they remain
completely unused.
• Using these resources for other purposes after work hours could improve the efficiency
of the IT infrastructure.
• In order to transparently provide such a service, it would be necessary to deploy a
completely separate environment, which can be achieved through virtualization.
Virtualization & Containers
3. Lack of Space:
• The continuous need for additional capacity, whether this is storage or
compute power, makes data centers grow quickly.
• Companies like Google and Microsoft expand their infrastructure by
building data centers, as large as football fields, that are able to host
thousands of nodes.
• Although this is viable for IT giants, in most cases enterprises cannot
afford building another data center to accommodate additional
resource capacity.
• This condition along with hardware underutilization led to the
diffusion of a technique called server consolidation, for which
virtualization technologies are fundamental.
Virtualization & Containers
4. Greening Initiatives:
• Recently, companies are increasingly looking for ways to reduce the amount
of energy they consume and to reduce their carbon footprint.
• Data centers are one of the major power consumers and contribute consistently
to the impact that a company has on the environment.
• Maintaining a data center operation does not only involve keeping servers on,
but a lot of energy is also consumed for keeping them cool.
• Infrastructures for cooling have a significant impact on the carbon footprint of
a data center.
• Hence, reducing the number of servers through server consolidation will
definitely reduce the impact of cooling and power consumption of a data
center.
• Virtualization technologies can provide an efficient way of consolidating
servers.
Virtualization & Containers
5. Rise of Administrative Costs:
• Power consumption and cooling costs have now become higher than the cost of the
IT equipment.
• Moreover, the increased demand for additional capacity, which translates into more
servers in a data center, is also responsible for a significant increment in the
administrative costs.
• Computers, in particular servers, do not operate all on their own, but they require
care and feeding from system administrators.
• Common system administration tasks include: hardware monitoring; defective
hardware replacement; server setup and updates; server resources monitoring; and
backups.
• These are labor-intensive operations, and the higher the number of servers that have
to be managed, the higher the administrative costs.
• Virtualization can help in reducing the number of required servers for a given
workload, thus reducing the cost of the administrative personnel.
Virtualization & Containers
• These can be considered the major causes for the diffusion of
hardware virtualization solutions and, together with them, the other
kinds of virtualization.
• The first step towards a consistent adoption of virtualization
technologies has been made with the wide spread of virtual machine-
based programming languages: in 1995, Sun released Java, which
soon became popular among developers.
• The ability to integrate small Java applications, called applets, made
Java a very successful platform and with the beginning of the new
millennium, Java played a significant role in the application server
market segment, thus demonstrating that the existing technology was
ready to support the execution of managed code for enterprise class
applications.
Virtualization & Containers
• In 2002, Microsoft released the first version of .NET framework, which was
Microsoft’s alternative to the Java technology.
• Based on the same principles of Java, ability to support multiple programming
languages and featuring a complete integration with other Microsoft
technologies, the .NET framework soon became the principal development
platform for the Microsoft world and quickly became popular among developers.
• In 2006, two of the three “official languages” used for development at Google
were based on the virtual machine model: Java and Python.
• This trend of shifting towards virtualization from a programming language
perspective demonstrated an important fact: the technology was ready to support
virtualized solutions without a significant performance overhead.
• This paved the way to another and more radical form of virtualization that now
has become a fundamental requisite for any data center management
infrastructure.
