Guide to Virtualization: Importance, Understanding, and Exam Tips

Importance: Virtualization is a crucial technology in IT and offers multiple benefits such as cost reduction, efficient resource utilization, flexibility, and scalability. Increased cloud computing demands make its understanding even more essential.

What is Virtualization: Virtualization refers to the process of creating a virtual version of something such as a hardware platform, operating system, storage device, or network resources. Rather than interacting with physical systems or processes, everything is performed on 'virtual' instances.

How It Works: In virtualization, a software called a 'hypervisor' creates and runs virtual machines (VMs). These VMs emulate physical computers, allowing multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on a single physical machine. You can think of hypervisor as an operating system for operating systems.

Exam Tips - Answering Questions on Virtualization:
1. Understand the basics: Be clear on what virtualization is and how it works, including key terms like hypervisor, virtual machines, guest, and host operating systems.
2. How to use it: Knowing practical application scenarios for virtualization, such as testing and development, disaster recovery, server consolidation, etc. is vital.
3. Differences: Be able to distinguish between different types of virtualization like OS-level, hardware, storage, and network virtualization.
4. Impact on Businesses: Observe how virtualization can improve business efficiency and savings.
5. Pro's and Con's: Although virtualization provides numerous benefits, it also comes with challenges like VM sprawl, resource allocation issues, etc. Understand these pros and cons appropriately.