Week 2: Virutal Hardware

 

 In week 2, the chapter covered the different types of hypervisors and how hardware resources work within them.  The chapter covers type 1 (bare-metal) and type 2 (host-based) hypervisors, explaining their differences.

Although most of the information wasn’t new to me, what I like about the book is the depth it delves into discussing why it’s important to understand the allocation of hardware resources and how they function. For example, the virtual allocation of the GPU happens in two approaches: pass-through and virtual or shared. In pass-through, the GPU can only be used by one VM at a time. In virtual or shared mode, the resources are artificially divided into portions that can be allocated simultaneously to multiple VMs.

It was interesting to learn about the concept of ballooning, which is basically when the guest OS releases some of its RAM so the hypervisor can allocate it elsewhere.

The chapter also covers alternative VM options, such as serverless applications and containers. The containers enable the execution of multiple applications with their own dependencies, allowing them to run in isolated units, which eliminates the overhead caused by running an actual operating system and its applications. 

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