The Role of Virtualization in Distributed Systems

Every (distributed) computer system actually provides a programming interface to higher-level software, as can be seen in the below Fig (a). There are many various kinds of interfaces, from the fundamental instruction set that a CPU provides to the enormous selection of application programming interfaces that are included with many modern middleware systems. To emulate the behaviour of another system, virtualization essentially involves extending or replacing an existing interface, as seen in Fig (b).

By effectively having each application run on its own virtual computer, possibly with the associated libraries and operating system, which in turn run on a common platform, virtualization can help minimise the diversity of platforms and machines. A high degree of portability and flexibility is offered by virtualization.

A virtual resource, such as a server, desktop, operating system, file, storage, or network, is created through the process of virtualization. Virtualization’s main objective is to manage workloads by fundamentally altering conventional computing to make it more scalable. It is possible to think of threads and processes as ways to do multiple tasks simultaneously. We can construct (parts of) programmes that appear to run simultaneously thanks to them. Naturally, this simultaneous execution is fiction on a single-processor computer. A single thread or process will only have one instruction at a time because there is only one CPU. The illusion of parallelism is achieved by moving back and forth quickly between threads and processes.
Resource virtualization is a term used to describe the difference between having a single CPU and being able to pretend there are multiple CPUs.