Virtualization, as we all know today, is a decades-old technology that was first implemented in the mainframes of the 1960s. Virtualization was a way to logically divide the mainframe's resources for different application processing. With the rise in energy costs, running under-utilized server hardware is no longer a luxury. Virtualization enables us to do more with less, thus saving energy and money while creating a virtual green data center without geographical boundaries.
A hypervisor is a piece of software, hardware, or firmware that creates and manages virtual machines. It is the underlying platform or foundation that allows a virtual infrastructure to be built. In a way, it is the very building block of all virtualization. A bare metal hypervisor acts as a bridge between physical hardware and the virtual machines by creating an abstraction layer. Because of this unique feature, an entire virtual machine can be moved over a vast distance over the internet and be made available to function exactly the same. A virtual machine does not see the hardware directly; instead, it sees the layer of the hypervisor, which is the same no matter what hardware the hypervisor has been installed on.
The Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) is a cluster-based hypervisor and one of the best-kept secrets in the virtualization industry. The reason is simple. It allows you to build an enterprise business-class virtual infrastructure at a small business-class price tag without sacrificing stability, performance, and ease of use. Whether it is a massive data center to serve millions of people, or a small educational institution, or a home serving important family members, Proxmox can handle configuration to suit any situation.
If you have picked up this book, you are no doubt familiar with virtualization, and perhaps well versed with other hypervisors, such as VMware, Xen, Hyper-V, and so on. In this chapter and upcoming chapters, we will see the mighty power of Proxmox from the inside out. We will examine scenarios and create a complex virtual environment. We will tackle some heavy day-to-day issues and show resolutions that might just save the day in a production environment. We will also learn how to deploy a highly redundant storage system using Ceph to store virtual machines. So strap yourself in and let's dive into the virtual world with the mighty hypervisor, Proxmox VE.