Answer Description

A Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud model that focuses on simplifying software delivery. A PaaS will try to automate everything but the software development itself, including the creation of application servers, configuration of those servers, network setup and possibly even creation of additional services like databases or file storage servers. The ultimate goal of a PaaS is to be so simple a developer can upload their code and it will run without the need of specialized IT operations teams to install, configure, monitor, etc. the application.

Wikipedia

Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing platform and one or more applications, without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching the application(s); and to allow developers to create, develop, and package such software bundles.

Answer Description

Each virtual host is going to have one or more Virtual Network Interface Cards (NIC). These Virtual NICs are used to route traffic to each virtual host without sending network traffic to all hosts on a server. This is important because cloud providers typically place many customer's virtual servers on the same physical server (Resource Pooling).

Answer Description

A Hypervisor may also be referred to as the Virtual Machine Monitor or Virtual Machine Manager.

Wikipedia

A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called a host machine, and each virtual machine is called a guest machine. The hypervisor presents the guest operating systems with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. Unlike an emulator, the guest executes most instructions on the native hardware. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources: for example, Linux, Windows, and macOS instances can all run on a single physical x86 machine. This contrasts with operating-system–level virtualization, where all instances (usually called containers) must share a single kernel, though the guest operating systems can differ in user space, such as different Linux distributions with the same kernel. The term hypervisor is a variant of supervisor, a traditional term for the kernel of an operating system: the hypervisor is the supervisor of the supervisors, with hyper- used as a stronger variant of super-. The term dates to circa 1970; IBM coined it for the 360/65 and later used it for the DIAG handler of CP-67. In the earlier CP/CMS (1967) system, the term Control Program was used instead.

Answer Description

Hyper-V is a native hypervisor installed onto some Windows 10 and Windows Server operating systems. It is important to note that Hyper-V is not supported on Windows 10 Home. LXD is a hypervisor that runs on Linux operating systems and ESXi is a proprietary hypervisor from VMWare that runs directly on a host machine (bare metal) without the need for a host operating system.

Wikipedia

Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization component of the client editions of Windows NT. A server computer running Hyper-V can be configured to expose individual virtual machines to one or more networks. Hyper-V was first released with Windows Server 2008, and has been available without additional charge since Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. A standalone Windows Hyper-V Server is free, but has a command-line interface only. The last version of free Hyper-V Server is Hyper-V Server 2019, which is based on Windows Server 2019.

Answer Description

Your CIO is looking for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This model aims to automate the provisioning and creation of infrastructure like physical servers, networks and virtual machines. Most commonly an IaaS vendor will provide a virtual machine with a pre-installed operating system and provide access to you to configure based on your needs.

Wikipedia

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, network, servers and virtualization (which mostly refers, in this case, to emulating computer hardware). This service enable users to free themselves from maintaining an on-premises data center. The IaaS provider is hosting these resources in either a public cloud (meaning users share the same hardware, storage, and network devices with other users), private cloud (meaning users do not share these resources), or hybrid cloud (combination of both).It provides the customer with high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like backup, data partitioning, scaling, security, physical computing resources, etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines as well as the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.

Answer Description

Cloud computing offers on-demand infrastructure for ad-hoc requests like this, which makes it a great fit for the use case given. In a traditional data center you may not have the large servers needed, they may be in-use by another team or system, or you may not be able to afford the large servers required. With Cloud Computing you can get the servers necessary on demand and delete them when you are finished (backing up the results elsewhere before deleting).

Answer Description

Cloud Infrastructure, like all infrastructure, still requires special care to ensure it's security. Some of the benefits of Cloud Infrastructure are the pay-as-you-go model (usually per second or per minute billing), flexibility to create and delete servers on demand or automatically and the ease of provisioning complex services like database clusters without highly specialized experts.

Wikipedia

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a "pay as you go" model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

Answer Description

Scalable infrastructure is a technical benefit and not a business benefit of cloud computing. Of course this is still indirectly beneficial to a business, but most non-IT department personnel at a business will not know what scalable infrastructure means. It is important to be able to explain the business and technical benefits of different computing options based on your audience.

Answer Description

There is no special configuration needed when using Windows 10 inside of a virtual machine. Hypervisors provide virtual resources (CPU, Memory, etc.) that appears the same as physical hardware allowing operating systems to be installed and run exactly as they would on physical hosts.

Answer Description

VT-x is a technology from Intel that allows Hardware Assisted Virtualization (HAV). HAV enables virtual hosts to use processors directly in an isolated manor.

Wikipedia

In computing, hardware-assisted virtualization is a platform virtualization approach that enables efficient full virtualization using help from hardware capabilities, primarily from the host processors. A full virtualization is used to emulate a complete hardware environment, or virtual machine, in which an unmodified guest operating system (using the same instruction set as the host machine) effectively executes in complete isolation. Hardware-assisted virtualization was added to x86 processors (Intel VT-x, AMD-V or VIA VT) in 2005, 2006 and 2010 (respectively). Hardware-assisted virtualization is also known as accelerated virtualization; Xen calls it hardware virtual machine (HVM), and Virtual Iron calls it native virtualization.

Answer Description

Hypervisors often require special features to be supported and enabled by the host CPUs. Most commonly Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT) or AMD's AMD-V technology is required. In some cases this may not be enabled by default but can be enabled in the BIOS settings of the host machine.

Answer Description

This is false. As long as the Hypervisor can provide the resources (CPU, Memory, etc.) needed to run the OS installed onto the virtual machine there are no limitations. Windows 10, Windows Server, Linux, etc. can all be run virtually regardless of the host OS.

Answer Description

The security team is referencing Resource Pooling. Cloud vendors use resource pooling to maximize efficiency and minimize the cost of their infrastructure. Instead of buying lots of small servers and giving customers access, they create pools of infrastructure using large servers. Using virtualization the large servers are divided up into smaller chunks and assigned to customers based on their computing requirements. This means it is likely that in a public cloud you have your own virtual resources, but those virtual resources are sharing the same physical resources as other customers of the cloud vendor.

Answer Description

In virtual computing the Hypervisor is the component that manages and runs the virtual machines. It can be a software running on top of a host operating system or can be a hardware/firmware component that runs without the need for a host operating system.

Wikipedia

A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called a host machine, and each virtual machine is called a guest machine. The hypervisor presents the guest operating systems with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. Unlike an emulator, the guest executes most instructions on the native hardware. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources: for example, Linux, Windows, and macOS instances can all run on a single physical x86 machine. This contrasts with operating-system–level virtualization, where all instances (usually called containers) must share a single kernel, though the guest operating systems can differ in user space, such as different Linux distributions with the same kernel. The term hypervisor is a variant of supervisor, a traditional term for the kernel of an operating system: the hypervisor is the supervisor of the supervisors, with hyper- used as a stronger variant of super-. The term dates to circa 1970; IBM coined it for the 360/65 and later used it for the DIAG handler of CP-67. In the earlier CP/CMS (1967) system, the term Control Program was used instead.

Answer Description

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud model focused on provide a specific functionality to it's users without those customers needing to worry about infrastructure, networking, configuring servers, etc. Most internet based services fall into the SaaS category. Examples of email SaaS providers are Google Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail.com and Outlook.com.

Wikipedia

Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software.SaaS is considered to be part of cloud computing, along with infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), desktop as a service (DaaS), managed software as a service (MSaaS), mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), data center as a service (DCaaS), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), and information technology management as a service (ITMaaS).SaaS apps are typically accessed by users of a web browser (a thin client). SaaS became a common delivery model for many business applications, including office software, messaging software, payroll processing software, DBMS software, management software, CAD software, development software, gamification, virtualization, accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), management information systems (MIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, field service management, human resource management (HRM), talent acquisition, learning management systems, content management (CM), geographic information systems (GIS), and service desk management. SaaS has been incorporated into the strategy of nearly all enterprise software companies.