Research on the Virtualization Technology in Cloud Computing Environment

Virtualization and Cloud computing are two popular research directions in recent times. Today, Virtualization is being used by a growing number of organizations to reduce power consumption, Server Consolidation, Testing and Development, Dynamic Load Balancing and Disaster Recovery, Virtual Desktops and Improved System Reliability and Security. Virtualization also provides high availability for critical applications, and streamlines application deployment and migrations. Through cloud computing, Information Technology resources can be delivered as services over the Internet to the end user. Virtualization is one of such important core technologies of cloud computing. In this paper, we present a detailed review on virtualization. Furthermore, three technologies for x86 CPU virtualization and the architecture of Xen are introduced. Specifically, we propose an architecture of the cloud computing platform based on virtualization. Finally, we discuss the performance evaluation of server virtualization in saving cost, time and energy consumption.