Virtualization Concepts
Key concepts in hardware virtualization and virtual machines.
The concepts of virtualization: type 1 and type 2 hypervisors, virtual machines, paravirtualization, hardware-assisted virtualization and SR-IOV, plus live migration, snapshots, nested virtualization, ballooning, virtio drivers, device passthrough and thin provisioning.
Use it when
- You need to explain how virtual machines share hardware and which techniques improve performance.
- You are comparing virtualization with containers.
Watch out for
- Virtual machines include a full guest operating system; containers share the host kernel, which changes isolation and overhead.
- Feature availability depends on the hypervisor and the hardware.
The data
13 rows
| Concept | Description | Examples | Vs | Benefit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hypervisor (Type 1) | Bare-metal hypervisor running directly on hardware. | VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen, KVM | null | null |
| Hypervisor (Type 2) | Hosted hypervisor running on top of a host operating system. | VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, Parallels | null | null |
| Virtual Machine | Emulated computer system with its own OS and resources. | null | vs Container: heavier isolation, full OS | null |
| Para-virtualization | Guest OS is modified to communicate with hypervisor via hypercalls. | Xen (early), IBM LPARs | null | null |
| Hardware-assisted Virtualization | CPU extensions (Intel VT-x, AMD-V) enable efficient VM isolation. | Modern hypervisors all use this | null | null |
| SR-IOV | Single Root I/O Virtualization - allows direct VM access to PCIe devices. | null | null | Near-native network performance |
| Live Migration | Moving a running virtual machine between hosts with little or no downtime. | VMware vMotion, KVM live migration, Hyper-V Live Migration | null | null |
| Snapshot | A point-in-time capture of a virtual machine's disk and optionally memory state for rollback. | VMware snapshots, QEMU/KVM snapshots | null | null |
| Nested Virtualization | Running a hypervisor inside a virtual machine. | KVM nested, Hyper-V nested virtualization | null | null |
| Memory Ballooning | A guest driver gives memory back to the host on request so memory can be overcommitted. | VMware balloon driver, virtio-balloon | null | null |
| virtio | A standard set of paravirtual device drivers for efficient network and disk I/O in guests. | virtio-net, virtio-blk | null | null |
| PCI Passthrough | Giving a guest direct access to a physical device such as a GPU for near-native performance. | VFIO, Intel VT-d, AMD-Vi | null | null |
| Thin Provisioning | Allocating virtual disk space only as it is used instead of reserving it all up front. | Thin disks in VMware, qcow2 sparse images | null | null |
Fields
The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.
| Section | Field | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | concept | string | Hypervisor (Type 1) |
| data | description | string | Bare-metal hypervisor running directly on hardw… |
| data | examples | string | VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen, KVM |
| data | vs | string | vs Container: heavier isolation, full OS |
| data | benefit | string | Near-native network performance |
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