The two pieces of software we will talk about fit into the full virtualization category. These are part of a bigger category named hardware virtualization, but there are also other (software, network or storage, amongst others) virtualization types, which we will not detail here. The first category is named full virtualization, because it emulates a complete hardware environment, the second is named paravirtualization, because it doesn’t emulate hardware and hence needs special modifications at guest level, a good example of this type of virtualization being Xen.
There are two types of virtualization : one that can run the guest system as-is (as in, unmodified) and another that request a modified kernel on the guest’s side in order to run. You are expected to know your way around Linux systems, how to install a Linux distribution and how to install software on it, although we will show you how to install the two aforementioned virtualization packages on some of the popular Linux distributions. We will begin with a short introduction about virtualization in general, then we will specifically treat VirtualBox and KVM as they seem to be most popular open source full virtualization solutions.
Virtualization can be useful to you if you are an enterprise architect, developer, a home user or basically everything in between. Looking at the trends in the IT industry, virtualization has seen quite a boom in the last few years, because it fits the concepts of utility computing and/or software as a service. Besides the more obvious advantages, virtual machines help create a greener and easier to administer computing environment. Virtualization software emulates a real machine and “fools” the guest operating system into thinking it’s running on a real computer. Virtualization packages are means for users to run various operating systems without “bare-metal” hardware – basically, you can run more than one operating system on a single computer without dual-booting or similar approaches.
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