Virtualizing Resources for the Cloud - Large Scale and Big Data: Processing and Management - page 524

TABLE 16.2
Comparison between Different Virtualization Suites

Feature vSphere 5.1 Hyper-V 2012 XenServer 6 RHEV 3

Hypervisor name ESXi Hyper-V Xen KVM

CPU virtualization
support

Full virtualization Para-

virtualization

Para-
virtualization

Full
virtualization

Maximum vCPUs
per VM

160 320 64 160

Maximum memory
per VM

1 TB 1 TB 128 GB 2 TB

Memory
overcommitment
support

Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s

Page sharing support Ye s No No No

Live migration
support

Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s

Contains device
drivers

Ye s No No Ye s

Common cloud
vendors(s)

vCloud Hybrid
Service [58]

Microsoft Azure
[41]

Amazon EC2
[3] and
Rackspace [49]

IBM
SmartCloud [29]

16.9 CASE STUDY: AMAZON ELASTIC COMPUTE CLOUD
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a vital part of Amazon's cloud
computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). On August 25, 2006 Amazon
launched EC2, which together with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3),
marked the change in the way IT was done. Amazon EC2 is a highly reliable and
scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with a utility payment model. It allows
users to rent virtual machines (VMs) and pay for the resources that they actually
consume. Users can set up and configure everything in their VMs, ranging from
the operating system up to any application. Specifically, a user can boot an Amazon
Machine Image (AMI) to create a VM, referred in Amazon's parlance as an instance .
AMI is a virtual appliance (or a VM image) that contains user's operating system,
applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings.
Users can create EC2 instances either via using default AMIs prepackaged by
Amazon or via developing their own AMIs using Amazon's bundling tools. Default
AMIs are preconfigured with an ever-growing list of operating systems including
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows Server, and Ubuntu, among others. A wide
selection of free software provided by Amazon can also be directly incorporated
within AMIs and executed over EC2 instances. For example, Amazon provides
software for databases (e.g., Microsoft SQL [44]), application servers (e.g., Tomcat
JavaWeb Application [7]), content management (e.g., MediaWiki [40]), and business
intelligence (e.g., Jasper Reports [30]). Added to the wide assortment of free soft-
ware, Amazon services (e.g., Amazon Relational Database Service, which supports