Overview

Let’s learn the important characteristics of virtualization in cloud computing in this tutorial. Virtualization separates resources and services from the underlying physical environment.

Characteristics of Virtualization

The main characteristics of virtualization in cloud computing are as follows:

• Partitioning
• Isolation
• Emulation
• Sharing
• Load balancing

Partitioning

Partitioning is one of the main characteristics of Virtualization technology. It allows many operating systems and applications to be supported on a single physical system by partitioning the available hardware resources.

Isolation

The virtual machine is self-contained and is isolated from its host physical system and other virtualized machines. Each self-contained virtual machine is independent of another virtual machine. For example, if one virtual machine instance crashes, it won’t affect the other virtual machines.

Emulation

The virtualized environment makes calls to the emulated hardware. The virtualization software would intercept and maps the calls to the actual underlying physical hardware.

Load balancing

The load balancer is software or a device that handles the traffic requests of a server. The virtualization platforms make sure that the incoming traffic requests from the clients are distributed across the virtual servers. Load balancing has many advantages like high throughput and low latency of the requests.