From the course: Linux: Overview and Installation

What is virtualization? - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux: Overview and Installation

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What is virtualization?

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- [Narrator] What is virtualization? At a low level, it's replacing real physical resources with virtual ones that only exist in software. Virtualization is creating a virtual version of something specifically computer hardware, storage devices and network resources. If you want to virtualize a computer you would have a hypervisor that creates a software layer to intercept software requests for hardware. For example, in a type two hypervisor like VirtualBox, your virtualized application in a VM, would request a resource such as drive space from the operating system it's running on. This would be the guest operating system. In our case, Enterprise Linux 8. The guest OS, would request a resource from the virtual machine provided by VirtualBox. The hypervisor and VirtualBox would make the request to the host operating system which was VirtualBox can be windows, Mac OS, Linux or Solaris, which then allocates the real physical resource. This process is followed for all requests by virtual machines for real physical resources. In this course we're using VirtualBox to virtualize Enterprise Linux. VirtualBox provides virtual CPU's, virtual hard drive controllers and drives, network cards, virtual ports, display cards and even a BIOS. The guest operating system doesn't even know is running inside a virtual machine until you add VirtualBox guest additions. Virtualization is an important element in cloud computing and more importantly for you, it's invaluable for learning. Using virtualization, it is easy to set up lab environments for installing and configuring operating systems and learning networking. In the past it may have taken weeks to do the same with physical hardware, in addition to a lot of money.

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