What Is Virtualization? VMs, Hypervisors & Cloud-Native Virtualization Explained

Overview

Virtualization allows one physical computer or server to run multiple isolated virtual machines (VMs). Each VM has its own operating system and environment while sharing the host’s processor, memory, storage, and network resources.

A hypervisor coordinates VMs by allocating resources and supporting tasks such as creating VMs, moving workloads between hardware, and restarting a VM after a failure.

At enterprise scale, virtualization can help organizations maintain legacy systems, simplify testing and deployment, limit the impact of faults, improve recovery, and make better use of existing hardware.

How virtualization has evolved

Virtualization has developed from a way to get more value from expensive computers, to a solution for the cost and complexity of managing many machines, and then into a foundation for on-demand cloud infrastructure.

VMware market changes

The video discusses the market shift following Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware. It says Gartner reported that many organizations faced spending increases of three to four times compared with previous years, prompting interest in VMware alternatives.

The video frames modernization as a gradual improvement of existing VM operations rather than a complete replacement all at once.

VMs, containers, and orchestration

• VMs package a complete computing environment.
• Containers package an application and what it needs to run.
• Hypervisors coordinate VMs; Kubernetes coordinates containers.

With cloud-native virtualization, Kubernetes can provide a shared management interface for VMs and containers running side by side, while VMs continue to run on a hypervisor. The video presents this approach as a way to reduce tool switching and operational complexity while increasing automation and reliability.

Guides and related resources

• A Gartner article breaking down the VMware acquisition and related changes.
• A separate video about containers.

Main speaker or source

A SUSE video narrator or presenter; no individual speaker is identified.