Updated March 27, 2023
Introduction to Virtualization Platforms
In this article, we will go through the topic of virtualization and the different platforms which provide virtualization. Virtualization is nothing but a kind of cloud service, to be precise it’s an infrastructure as a service provided by 3rd party agencies to the end-user. The infrastructure, in this case, is basically the resources such as memory (primary, secondary) both, processing power, GPUs, etc. As the computing landscape is evolving very fast and the systems are getting powerful day by day in terms of processing speed and memory and many other aspects, as a result, most of the end-user cannot afford those high-end systems for their office or day to day work, thus the concepts of virtualization came into picture.
What is Virtualization?
This virtualization concept is not the new concepts it’s a very old concept existing for a long time. But hardly used by single users or small or mid-range businesses. The definition of virtualization can be framed as such, virtualization is nothing but creating and provide IT infrastructure as a service.
There are different types of virtualization provided in the market such as:
- Data virtualization
- Desktop Virtualization
- Server Virtualization
- Operating system virtualization
Let’s not discuss the types of virtualization as this will be out of scope for this article. We will rather discuss the different platforms or rather software that help provide virtualization. As virtualization is quite a new thing for small and medium-sized business houses.
Different Virtualization Platforms
Below are the top 5 virtualization platform which can be used and implemented by anyone whether it’s a small business or a large company.
1. VMware
- If we talk about virtualization the first thing which comes to mind is VMware.
- VMware is the best option for virtualization as it’s easy to use and has robust security features.
- VMware offers different solutions to cater to a wide variety of needs for different sized business houses.
2. Citrix
- Citrix is one of the emerging platforms who provide virtualization
- It has popular remote access tools such as GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting apps.
- Citrix also has specifically designed virtualization software such as XenApp, XenDesktop, and VDI-in-a-box which can be used by small and mid-range business houses.
- Citrix also claims that non-IT staff can provide support and work with their application.
- They also have a free version to try and test their platform.
3. Microsoft
- Microsoft provides software known as Hype-V for visualization.
- It is in boom since it has very good integration with the Microsoft cloud platform Azure.
- The only drawback for this is that we need to maintain an in-house or outsource IT professional to work with this platform.
- This platform provides everything a business house requires starting from virtualization service to many more others.
4. Oracle
- Oracle is the company that provides many services starting from the database management system to customer relationship management.
- Oracle offers everything from Desktop virtualization, to app virtualization.
- There are multiple benefits of using their platform as they consolidate all the services into one and provide you support for the same.
5. Amazon
- Amazon has a service where the server is provided for the end-user to use.
- Amazon has an EC2 platform that provides the infrastructure for small and mid-range businesses.
- The scalability feature of this platform is unique, and if the business house wants rapid growth it must go with amazon EC2 platform
- Amazon can scale any visualization feature very quickly and finely without any issues.
In Data science also there is a major part of virtualization. As we all know to work with machine learning and deep learning models high processing power is required and everybody cannot afford that sum high computing power. So google is the leading company to provide platform and resources to work with ML/DL models
Google Collaborator
- This is a virtual environment which is the replica of the anaconda environment which is a data science environment provided by python.
- This service is free and hosted in the cloud where anyone can create an ipython notebook and start coding their machine learning model.
- Here we can customize the processing power from RAM to GPU and CPU power.
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This is a guide to Virtualization Platforms. Here we discuss what is virtualization and top 5 virtualization platforms in detail. You can also go through our other related articles to learn more –
