The needs of users to use same mobiles phones & tablets for personal & business purposes due to preference of corporate employees to bring their own device (BYOD), the needs of handset OEMs to try out different operating systems quickly in market, the needs of banks and cloud computing platform providers to reduce costs can be taken care through virtualization. This blog give details on virtualization covering its benefits and challenges.

Virtualization is creating a virtual version of a hardware platform or an operating system (OS) or a device. The creation of virtual version happens by means of creating virtual machine. Host machine is the actual machine on which virtualization takes place and the guest machine or OS or device is the virtual machine.

In Traditional architecture in which Operating system runs on the hardware, user will be able to use only one Operating system. Whereas in virtualization architecture, any number of Operating systems can run on same hardware, subject to the processing capability.

Virtualization enables many applications & Operating systems to run on server, thus maximizing server utilization and minimizing number of servers to be deployed. This helps in scaling up the service with reduced cost. Since there are too many variations in the hardware platforms, it is costly for OEMs to port different operating systems or Applications on these platforms. Virtualization helps in this by abstracting the underlying hardware platform.

However, there are challenges with Virtualization like the need for configuring Virtual machine to enable necessary peripherals & devices, performance & power issues. Sasken is developing virtualization platform using which we can run any guest OS. This will be helpful in trying out any operating system without support of chipset vendor.

Authored by Krishna Kishore