Virtualization Technology and Security
Virtualization is a process through which one can create something that is there in effect and performance but in reality not there—that is, virtual. It is a physical abstraction of the company’s computing resources like storage, network servers, memory,
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Introduction
Virtualization is a process through which one can create something that is there in effect and performance but in reality not there—that is, virtual. It is a physical abstraction of the company’s computing resources like storage, network servers, memory, and others. VMware.com, a software developer and a global leader in the virtualization market, defines virtualization as a process in which software creates virtual machines (VMs) including a virtual machine monitor called “hypervisor” that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple operating systems, called “guest operating systems,” can run concurrently on a single physical computer without even knowing it [1]. For example, using software virtualization, one can, using the existing underlying hardware and software resources like operating systems, create and run several independent virtual operating systems on top of one physical operating system using the existing hardware resources to execute independent system tasks. Hardware virtualization also takes the same concept where several servers or client machines can be created based on one underlying hardware. The virtualization concept has been with us for sometime. The potential power of virtualization in substantially increasing the performance of computing systems such as hardware and software through division of the underlying physical computing resources into many equally powerful virtual machines has increased the popularity of the technology in the last 20 years, and this love continues today. According to the IDC, an IT research firm, 2012 ranking of chief information officer (CIO) priorities, virtualization and the server consolidation that it delivers were the top priority for chief information officers. Forty percent of CIOs picked virtualization and server consolidation, more than any other area of IT [2]. The rush to virtualization is driven by its resulting server consolidation creating savings to be invested in new IT initiatives such as cloud computing, mobility, data analytics, and use of social media for business purposes. This rapid growth is a reflection of the changing benefits of virtualization from being used only # Springer International Publishing AG 2017 J.M. Kizza, Guide to Computer Network Security, Computer Communications and Networks, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55606-2_21
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Virtualization Technology and Security
as a tactical tool to drive consolidation and higher system utilization to leveraging the mobility of virtual machines to improve management and operations of IT environments. The virtualization concept now includes a host of new use cases that range from high availability and disaster recovery to hosted clients and true utility computing.
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History of Virtualization
The history of virtualization is as amazing as the concept itself. Since computers of the 1960s could do only one task at a time and depended on human operators, increasing system performance was bottlenecked at two points: at the submission
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