Lets discuss VMs, Virtual Machines -
and all this "in the Cloud hype" we hear all the time nowadays
If you want to know something that is mind boggling, then check out the Virtual Machine!
This post was written in laypersons terms, hope you enjoy!
Almost everyone who has worked with a computer at home or at work will get the dreaded hard drive full messages! and now what? have to clear space and or replace with a bigger drive for more space?
Enter
Virtual Technology. Forever scalable and robust, and the above does not
apply, need more space? need another drive? Instant changes can be made
in the Virtual Environments. Because unlike the old Hardware Server machine on premises now it is in the cloud, running user management and all apps and services needed for companies to be able to do work daily, and all virtual or make believe!
Something for nothing, well not totally, but a lot of make believe hard drive working space, and resources from one hardware box!. So in the past any business would have to purchase servers, which are the backbone of all things for business users, apps and network management. But now enter VMs which have been on the scene for quite a while. Can be applied in different concepts depending on the needs.
So lets say XYZ company needs to have a server, or want to get away from the maintenance of on premises servers and wants to use cloud services. Well lots of options and popular thing is Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Cloud Services, which all can run a VM environment for you, your company only pays the subscription fees and no more worry s on hardware server boxes and maintenance, as the service fee includes all you need to access your VM resources in the cloud, for robust office applications, user management, firewalls. Still some physical presence is needed on your company sites, such as switches and on prem connections like a hardware firewall is best practice, but the bulk of all that for awhile now has been you can just have your servers hosted in cloud VM environment. Below will lay out how crazy this is and how you get "something for nothing" the best way to describe a Virtual Machine Environment.
My VM labs screen grab and explanation.
So this is just a testing lab I have to both keep sharp in VMs and also testing apps and peripheral connections, and remote access etc.
You will see in the screen grab, there are 2 VMs running. Both which have 100 GIG hard drive space! But wait there is more! The hard drive of the computer driving the VM environment with Hyper V, only had 30 GIG free space.
Left
top - VM manager environment panel- on right VM 1, and then VM 2, and
on bottom left the hard drive of the main computer running this VM
environment. Have free hard drive space on VMs and make believe actual
working space on the 2 Virtual Machines. Now the hard drive space has
been allocated on VM technologies, but enough working space that can use
the main computer and the 2 VMs at same time!
So as in above screen grab, here is something for nothing! Now you say. How is this possible wow! Well quite simply it is all that virtual technology "voodoo" working, But you can get into trouble ,as resources can dwindle, and either run out of resources such as the hard drive of the VM manager can get full from this environment, or memory allocations can start to struggle. So since hard drive space and memory is shared by the computer running the Hyper V environment - monitoring is important!
As this scenario shows - just like a real world environment where there are cloud Virtual Machines, and many running from one hardware device. Resources need to be checked, for smooth operation and system overloads. VMs are an amazing new thing and every year more advances in this technology is made.