Performance Support

Virtualization: Virtual Machines/Physical Machines Comparisons

Transcript
In a traditional physical server, an operating system is installed on physical hardware. You load the operating system on the physical server and that operating system accesses the hardware directly. This provides an isolated environment, where the OS and applications can be loaded and execute instructions and do work. That's in a physical environment. The introduction o virtual machines changes some o those relationships, while some remain the same. So, let's look at where physical machines and virtual machines are similar. !irst o all, the underlying in rastructure and so tware in place or virtual machines has already been taken care o or our demo here today. "e#re using the $%ware vSphere &lient to access a $%ware 'S( physical server directly. )ere is our $%ware host server. In the Summary tab because this 'S( environment is installed directly on physical hardware we can see the model o the server, the number o &*+ cores, the amount o memory, what it has access to or disk storage...because it's loaded directly on a physical environment. Once the environment is in place, and we create the $% as we#ve already done here,what you do next is very similar to what you would do in a physical environment. The operating system and applications that are used are all the same, whether the server is physical or virtual. You use the same installation media. You can apply the same patches in both cases. The installation, con iguration, and management o the operating system and applications in a $% can be done in the same ways that we#ve traditionally done those activities on physical servers. !rom the perspective o the operating system and the applications they have access to resources -ust as they would i they were loaded directly onto the physical server. So much o the look and eel and administrative tasks are exactly the same. In act, rom the administrator.s perspective, it#s very di icult to tell the di erence between a physical server and a $% when they're connected remotely to the operating system since the two are so similar. /et's have a look at the di erent pieces o the virtual machine. So, as we saw with the physical machine, we could see how many physical &*+s, how much physical memory, and how much physical disk space was involved. In the virtual case, it's pretty much the same only the resources now are virtual resources, which are shared on the underlying physical hardware. So, in this case, we#ve created a virtual machine with one &*+, 012%3 o 45%, and 2673 o hard disk space. Those resources are simply a virtual slice o the physical hardware underneath. So, in this case, the physical machine has our &*+s, 8273 o 45%, and we#re simply saying that the virtual machine is going to use one o those &*+s and 012%3 o 45%. 4esources presented to the virtual machines are virtuali9ed and presented rom the same physical hardware and appear as dedicated resources to the virtual machines. Instead o a drive letter on a $% linking back to an entire physical disk :as the case would be in a physical server;, the $% actually accesses a portion o the shared disk via a single ile that's representing the disk.

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This is called a virtual disk ile. "e#ll take a look at our virtual disk ile here by browsing out to the data store, opening up the older that contains all o the iles that make up our $%, and you can see here this is what's actually presented to the virtual machine as a single disk. The same is true or access to &*+ and memory resources. They appear dedicated to the operating system and applications but, in reality, they#re shared and dynamically allocated by the hypervisor to the virtual machines as re=uired. 5ll o these things make $%s much more lexible, mobile, and portable than their physical counterparts. 5 $% is easily moved rom one piece o physical hardware to another, even i the underlying hardware is di erent. Those are some o the main di erences between physical machines and virtual machines, and some o the main similarities.

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