Peering under the hood of an AWS Instance In a nutshell: Virtualization is about running more of the same whereas Emulation is about running something else.įor further reading, please see Link, Link. The thing to keep in mind is that Virtualization doesn’t enable you to run on the given hardware anything which you couldn’t just run natively. Virtualization is about taking an existing system architecture (like an Intel-based server) and enabling multiple instances of operating systems to run on it simultaneously while “playing nice” with each other.Įmulation, on the other hand, is taking an existing system architecture (like the aforementioned Intel-based server) and pretending that it is something completely different - like a Power processor running a Mac or a shiny new iPad. A word about Virtualization, and it’s prerequisitesīefore we jump into the full answer, let’s first have a quick refresher on Virtualization, Emulation and the difference between them. It is not possible to run any kind of Virtualization software inside an AWS Instance. The short answer to that question is: No. I commonly encounter the question whether an AWS instance can serve as a Virtualization host - be it Hyper-V, VMware or Xen.Īnd I can certainly understand the logic behind it - using Virtualization we could get so much more mileage out of our instances and theoretically drop the AWS costs even further down (more on that logic later).

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