Don’t know the difference between these two hottest terms, i.e. the cloud and virtualization? Well, you don’t have to worry because there are a whole lot of people like you, who often undermine the differences. In this article we highlight whether or not there are any differences between cloud computing and virtualization, if so, their nature and their form as well.

The first basic reason for any such confusion with these terms is purely because they are related, and more or less are similar technologies. But careful, that doesn’t mean they are actually interchangeable or so. Each of these terms has their own specific meaning and their difference is significant enough to make matters worse, if used in place of another. Hence this article will relieve you from any of such perplexities on cloud computing and virtualization.

Virtualization – What is it?

In a nutshell, virtualization is one among the many technologies that make cloud computing a reality. A text book definition of which looks like this: Virtualization is a means that can separate the available hardware resources or the physical infrastructure into various dedicated partitions, thereby effectively utilizing the entirety of the resources at hand. The three main areas where virtualization is most effective are network virtualization, storage virtualization and server virtualization.

A more detailed introspection into what virtualization actually means shows that a technology named something like the virtual machine monitor (VMM) is its back bone. Also called the virtual manager, it separates the computing environments from the actual hardware resources. To put it in another way, the virtual manager is the technology gives virtualization the power to make servers, storage and all the other systems independent of the actual physical infrastructure.

But the reason behind all this muddling is while implementing a private cloud, both virtualization and cloud computing are used together. In private cloud, with virtualization, the quantity of physical infrastructure required to host the entire enterprises’ data can be reduced moreover, the utilization of this infrastructure gets better than ever. Thus helping businesses reap large scale benefits on the long run.