A Brief Introduction to Cloud Computing and Virtualization

Cloud Computing

What is Cloud Computing: Users do not need to concern themselves with underlying implementation details. Through a network, they can access the required services from a simple terminal after authentication. Underlying implementation details refer to servers, operating systems, storage devices, power supply equipment, their physical locations, and device maintenance and management, none of which the user needs to worry about. The network here can be either a corporate intranet or the Internet. Simple terminals refer to support for a wide variety of endpoint devices, such as PCs, desktop terminals, smartphones, iPads, and so on.

Major Cloud Computing service providers: Amazon, Google, IBM
Major virtualization service providers: VMware, Microsoft, Citrix

Current state of Cloud Computing in China

Cloud Computing has been a buzzword in China for years, but progress was slow for a long time. In recent years, major carriers, equipment manufacturers, internet companies, and innovative startups have all ramped up their efforts, and the cloud era has finally arrived.
Companies in China advancing toward Cloud Computing can be grouped into the following categories:
The first category consists of companies primarily offering server hosting and server rental services, such as HiChina (Wanwang) and Cndns.
The second category includes large domestic equipment manufacturers such as Huawei, Inspur, and ZTE, which leverage their strong resource advantages to develop Cloud Computing solutions.
The third category comprises mobile, unicom, and telecom carriers, which aim to find new business models or directions through increased R&D investment in Cloud Computing.
The fourth category includes large internet companies. They are innovative and pioneering, and are the most dynamic advocates of Cloud Computing, represented by Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, and NetEase.

Virtualization
As an underlying implementation technology for Cloud Computing, virtualization pools server resources, storage resources, and network resources, enabling unified management and centralized scheduling of hardware. Through virtualization technology, hardware utilization can be greatly improved, TCO reduced, and reliability and scalability enhanced. It allows convenient management of servers, virtual machines, and storage, online resource adjustment, VM migration, storage migration, automatic load balancing, performance monitoring, and many other benefits.

Virtualization can be divided into several layers, from bottom to top: hardware layer (CPU, memory, storage), virtualization layer (ESXi), virtual machine layer (VM), virtual network layer (VDS), and application layer.
VMware editions: Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus.
VMware licensing: VMware still licenses per CPU. All editions have no limit on virtual memory, but do limit virtual CPU count. The Standard edition supports 8-way vCPU per CPU license, the Enterprise edition supports 32-way vCPU per CPU license, and Enterprise Plus supports 64-way vCPU per CPU license.
vCenter Server editions: Foundation and Standard, purchased separately.
vmware HOST configuration: 512vm/host, 4096vcpu/host, 32vcpu/core, 320cpu (logic), 4T mem
vmware VM configuration: 64vcpu/vm, 1T/vm, 4sp/vm, hotadd (cpu, mem, disk, nic, pcie ssd)

VMware Virtualization Core Software

Virtualization software can be divided into the following major categories:

Category 1: Data Center and Cloud Computing infrastructure. Key Software Products include:
vsphere5.5（esxi，vcenter server，vsphere client，operation management）
vCloud Suite
VSA，Data Prection
vcenter site recovery manager
NSX
Virtual SAN
Virsto

Category 2: Data Center and Cloud Computing management. Key Software Products include:
vCenter Operations Management Suite
vCenter Operations Manager
vCenter Configuration Manager
vCenter Hyperic
vCenter Log Insight
vCenter Server
vCloud Director
vCloud Automation Center
vCenter Orchestrator
IT Business Management Suite

Category 3: Desktop virtualization. Key Software Products include:
Horizon Suite
Horizon DaaS Platform
Horizon View (formerly known as VMware View)
Horizon Mirage
Horizon Workspace
Socialcast by VMware
ThinApp
vCenter Operations Manager for Horizon View

Mainstream virtualization technologies: Vmware, Hyper-v, Xen, KVM, Virtualbox, Qemu

RHEV
RHEV is Red Hat's enterprise virtualization solution based on Linux and KVM. It consists of 3 main components: RHEV-M management console, RHEV-H bare-metal Hypervisor, and RHEV central repository. Compared to other vendors' virtualization solutions, RHEV offers a more competitive price.

Openstack
OpenStack, commonly known as the open-stack cloud, is an open-source cloud platform management project jointly launched by NASA and Rackspace. It aims to provide an open-source software project for the construction and management of public and private clouds, enabling any individual or enterprise to easily build an IaaS cloud management platform. It has gained support from numerous well-known enterprises. OpenStack is composed of modules that perform specific tasks, including 2 main components: Nova and Swift. Nova is primarily used for computing and virtual server deployment, while Swift is primarily used for distributed storage deployment. (Written in Python)

Hadoop
Hadoop is a distributed system infrastructure that can be used to build distributed computing platforms, developed by the Apache Foundation. Hadoop consists of 2 main parts: HDFS for distributed storage, derived from GFS, and MapReduce for parallel computing applications. HDFS divides nodes into 2 categories: NameNode and DataNode, where NameNode stores metadata and DataNode stores data blocks. HDFS primarily controls file operations through NameNode. MapReduce similarly divides nodes into two categories: JobTracker and TaskTracker. MapReduce distributes tasks and manages inter-application communication through JobTracker nodes. Hadoop is characterized by high computational efficiency, high reliability, and good scalability. (Written in Java)

Source: 51CTO.com