For the vast majority of Cloud consumers, virtualization technologies run in the background of their applications, Linux and Windows servers and server graphical interface. While Cloud hosting professionals understand the importance of virtualization services, most consumers couldn’t tell you what virtualization solution their Cloud hosting company utilizes to allow client dynamic hosted servers to operate smoothly.
Partially, the lack of virtualization knowledge falls squarely on the consumer who, for reasons of not having the time, not caring to explore or simply not wanting to, hasn’t taken the time to understand how virtualization impacts their Cloud and colocation servers. Again, partially.
The majority of the blame of a lack of virtualization understanding within the Cloud market place is due to virtualization services like Xen, OpenVZ, VMWare and KVM running so smoothly and efficiently that no one ever takes notice. Another way of saying this: the reason most Cloud hosting consumers couldn’t tell you the difference between OpenVZ, Xen and KVM is precisely because the technology works so darn well.
It’s the old saying, if it ain’t broke, no one cares about it.
This said, virtualization – partially the backbone of the Cloud infrastructure we utilize today – is extremely important to how web hosting solutions are sold, how they are marketed, how they are utilized and how they interact with consumers on a granular level.
Virtualization is, after all, the main technology which allows for a lack of local storage, hardware and capacity to exist when a consumer uses his/her Cloud web server.
What Virtualization Does & Why It’s Vital
You could aptly state virtualization virtualizes the computing environment. While this is true, it’s a horrible explanation. In truth, virtualization virtualizes the resources needed to operate the computing environment in question. This is to say, virtualization allows RAM, Bandwidth, CPU Cores and Disk Space to live within a virtual environment behind the walls of the web hosting providers’ data center to ensure consumers aren’t maxing out their own local resources to make the most of their Linux or Windows Cloud server.
This is a more apt description of virtualization. Sitting above the virtualization layer is the consumer facing graphical interface Cloud hosting providers build. The graphical interface allows consumers to play with their server resources – RAM, Bandwidth, Diskspace, CPU – while also allowing for C Line access, server additions like uptime monitoring and any other granular controls a provider grants to their customers.
For the majority of Cloud hosting consumers, virtualization shows itself in the form of the graphical interface. With companies like Linode, Rackspace, VPS.net, Hivelocity and Solar VPS supplying the market with visually stunning and easy to use graphical interfaces to control their servers, consumers view their servers – and thus the virtualization service behind the server – as the customer facing interface.
The truth though is XEN, KVM, OpenVZ, VMWare and the like sit directly below the customer facing graphical interface ensuring all the functions of the top level go off without a hitch.
This is the reason virtualization is vital to Cloud hosting and colocation servers. It allows consumers to access and configure their web hosting servers without incredible knowledge or the utilization of local resources. Without virtualization, consumers would be paying to max out their own machines and would, most likely, have to maintain a system admin level of knowledge to operate their virtual machine.
Both of which, it goes without saying, wouldn’t be a godsend for Cloud sales, marketing or market acquisition.