Hardware Virtualization - Overview

Hardware virtualization is one of the three types of virtualization the DSM environment supports. Here, whole computers are virtualized with BIOS,operating system, drivers, applications and user settings (software computers).

Hereby hardware virtualization stands next to desktop virtualization and software virtualization:

• Desktop virtualization builds up on hardware virtualization. It provides end users with software computers (virtual machines) instead of physical computers. This differentiates desktop virtualization from terminal server computing, which lets several end users share a computer that hosts multiple user sessions.
• Software virtualization stands for the virtualization of individual applications instead of complete computers.

The Virtual Environments view is a DSMC system container introduced especially for hardware virtualization. In this view, the virtualization objects are displayed on the DSM virtualization tree.

Basically they represent

• physical computers that provide virtual machines (hosts) and
• physical computers that are in charge of managing several hosts (Virtualization Management Servers and/or Clusters).

The DSM role and rights model has been extended for hardware virtualization.Also, there are user-defined tasks and variables available.This makes DSM highly flexible and extendable.

Figure: Hardware virtualization. System components involved.