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Virtualization has some basic characteristics which help organizations to reduce hardware investment, operating cost, maintenance charges, and consumption of energy. It improves performance of system, as well as capability to recover data in disaster. Virtualization plays an important role in the growth of cloud computing.

Abstraction is important for cloud computing; therefore, virtualization separates applications as well as operating system from underlying machines. Decoupled procedure makes them able to travel across clusters, data centers, and servers. Side by side, virtualization brings together memory, resources and storage into particular virtual environment, and makes it easy to share applications and computing capacity through cloud.

Infrastructure Management
As far as cloud computing is concerned, it is linked with notable features. Some of familiar characteristics are as follows:

Scalability
Automation
IT Management
Agility
On-demand Delivery

Virtualization is recognized as primary source to help with the growth of cloud computing. On the other hand, the cloud offers a variety of benefits to virtual environment. When resources are librated and organized in virtual settings, they are dispersed and provisioned as needed. The cloud offers on-demand access, automated delivery and flexibility to particular resources and accommodates growth requirements. As a result, complexity and cost are reduced; and resources can be best utilized and extra attention can be directed towards business operations.

Growth of Non-Virtual Clouds
It is a fact that the cloud does not need virtualization to flourish; however, pairing of these two help in harvesting maximum benefits easily. It is the basic reason why the cloud platform is assisted through hypervisors like Hyper-V, as well as VMware Sphere. Moreover, there are a variety of technologies which are targeting to authorize the cloud to grow without assistance of virtualization any more.

Open source community has presented CoreOS as simple and easy to use operating system. It is based on Linux Kernel, which is familiar to may around the world. Services which are not important are stripped and Linux allocation makes use of particular containers to deliver security, performance and dependability advantages of virtual machines by using similar abstraction parts for which virtualization is renowned for. There is no use of hypervisor to get maximum advantage. Conversely, CoreOS assures nominal performance operating cost, as well as capability to strap up the cloud power by utilizing a few machines only.

One more open source alternative is Docker. It is best for those who are concerned to tap into cloud with no virtualization hassle. It is a particular type of tool, planned to containerize applications in an environment (Linux) without the need to virtualize the whole operating system. Cloud deployment is given power from Docker to enable the delivery of processes, tasks and application easy across a single physical machine or group of virtual machines. It works flawlessly with system CoreOS and improves the efficiency, speed and flexibility of available containers, as well as their significant applications.

If your organization is getting benefit from virtual environment, it means you have taken initiative for an infrastructure (cloud based) for an easy conversion. Though virtualization administration come with their own challenges, technologies such as CoreOS and Docker can be adopted as alternatives.

Continuous availability is the promise of the cloud. Tech refreshes sans downtime is a part of this promise. One of the factors that enable cloud services to deliver this promise is the use of VMware as part of their service offering.

VMware comes with a number of computing kits. VMware vSphere enables scalable server consolidation and functions as a high performance virtualisation layer.

vSphere abstracts server hardware resources and makes servers sharable across virtual machines . It consolidates workloads, automates business continuity, and facilitates centralised management of all applications.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery manager is a disaster recovery solution for multi-site environments. The Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) aligns computing resources to business needs and orchestrates load balancing across host machines, and optimises power consumption during peaks and troughs in the business.

vMotion eliminates the need for planned downtime by allowing live virtual migrations between machines.

Hadoop workloads can be run with vSphere to enhance utilisation, reliability and agility of the data center.

VMware delivers greater control over the network to the end user. It allows users define priority access to network resources in synchronisation with business policies. Network provisioning can be centralised and administration / monitoring of the data centre can be achieved by a process of network aggregation.

High availability is the foundation on which VMware promises are made. But, VMware does not confront the IT Administrator with the complexities of traditional clustering and builds in a fault tolerance that promises zero data loss in the event of server failures. It automatically detects and recovers systems even when the operating system fails. The agentless disk backup (with data de-duplication) reduces the amount of disk space consumed and eliminates any third party costs that may be incurred by users for replication of data.

VMware was designed to automate common tasks. The technology allows users deploy and patch vSphere hosts in minutes or create / configure profiles instantly. The update manager performs most tasks in the background non-intrusively.

Interestingly, security is never compromised even when performance is enhanced by eliminating anti-virus footprints. Security is offloaded to a virtual appliance called vShield Endpoint provided by partner organisations. vShield Endpoint is designed to eliminate anti-virus storms, implement end user access policies, and manage custom access configurations while facilitating compliance with existing legal mandates.