For all of you that want a place to point folks to describe the basics of virtualization, I have put together a few videos to describe the hypervisor, CPU, and network concepts in a visual way.
The intent is to give a quick amount of conceptual information to those folks that suddenly are dealing with VMs, but might not have the experience to fully understand what they are looking at.
Hypervisor Basics:
The basics of what a full (type 1) hypervisor is.
The hypervisor pool of resources – the CPU:
The basics of CPU scheduling. It is far more complex than this and there are many methods. It gets really messy when hyper-threading is introduced.
More CPU scheduling details are over at the Xen.org site (the Xen folks are more open in discussing the gritty details of all this): http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/CreditScheduler
The hypervisor pool of resource – the network:
This is about virtual networks / virtual switches / bridging. The concepts, as each vendor implementation offers different features.
