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Virtual machines (VMs) and Azure

The information provided below is intended to be complementary to the project script and is not required reading.

Motivation

The subject project consists of implementing an architecture that combines IIoT and CPS technologies. This technological solution is mounted on a virtual machine, which consists of a virtual computer system (with its own CPU, memory, network interface, storage, etc.) but which is created on a physical hardware system (it can be a computer complete, but can also be part of one if only part of its resources are used.

This technology allows:

  • Efficient management of physical resources. It is possible to adjust the costs more than in the case of having to permanently have large equipment and pay for its maintenance.
  • Offer portability and flexibility, since the services contracted to the provider can be modified in real time.
  • Guarantee a high degree of robustness, considering data redundancies so that information is not lost even in the event of technical problems.

However, it is possible to create virtual machines on a commonly used computer using various software such as VirtualBox or VMWare, which allow you to limit the resources available to the virtual machine.

Virtualization

Virtualization allows one physical system (hardware) to be shared with many virtual environments, which may be simultaneously running several different operating systems. Each operating system works the same way it would on a regular computer, so the emulated end-user experience inside the virtual machine is nearly identical to the experience of working on a running operating system. on a physical machine.

This technology makes sense because most application and operating system implementations only use a small amount of available physical resources. If you virtualize your servers, you can put many virtual servers on each physical server to improve system hardware usage.

A virtual machine provides an environment that is isolated from the rest of the system, so that anything running inside a virtual machine will not interfere with anything else running on the host hardware, which is the physical computer that hosts it.

Azure

The Azure platform, created by Microsoft, is made up of more than 200 cloud products and services. Azure Virtual Machines are one of several types of scalable, on-demand computing resources offered by Azure.

You can find all the documentation that Azure offers about its virtual machine service at the following link:

https://docs.microsoft.com/es-es/azure/virtual-machines/

Specifically, the following link refers to virtual machines with Linux operating system:

https://docs.microsoft.com/es-es/azure/virtual-machines/linux/overview