Cloud Computing Virtualization: A Comprehensive Survey

Cloud computing technology nowadays is a leading IT technology and introduces the next generation of distributed systems with a great acceptance and impact in the businesses. It influences the businesses on structural and operational processes with potential to reduce total costs and increase revenues. This technology is mainly service oriented and focuses on cost reduction, like hardware reduction, reduction on maintenance and total cost of ownership, and with different pricing models such as pay-per-use. Virtualization is the foundation process and technology in Cloud computing, as it hides the complexity of underlying hardware and software resources. It is the objective of virtualization to achieve an improvement in data security aspects, to provide flexible operations and data transfer, elimination (masking) of system failures and to ensure economic benefits. The aim of this research is through a systematic literature review of the existing work to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role and significance of virtualization within the domain of Cloud Computing.