virtualisatielaag

Virtualisatielaag, or virtualization layer, is a software layer that abstracts physical hardware resources to present virtualized computing resources to higher software layers. It serves as an intermediary between hardware and guest environments, enabling isolation, multiplexing, and portability of workloads.

It can be implemented as part of an operating system, a hypervisor, or as a middleware component in cloud platforms. Depending on design, it may sit beneath virtual machines, containers, or serverless runtimes, and it exposes a controlled interface for resource management and I/O handling.

Key functions include CPU scheduling and memory management, I/O virtualization for disks and networks, device emulation or passthrough, storage abstraction, networking virtualization, and security features such as process isolation and access control. The layer also provides monitoring and performance telemetry to support orchestration and scaling decisions.

Variants encompass full virtualization and para-virtualization, as well as kernel- or user-space implementations. In container-oriented architectures, the virtualization layer often overlaps with the container runtime and the host kernel’s namespaces and cgroups, while in VM-based environments it coordinates with the hypervisor layer.

Virtualisatielaag is used in data centers, cloud services, edge computing, and research environments to enable multi-tenant resource sharing, rapid deployment, and workload isolation. It supports migration, load balancing, and dynamic scaling by abstracting hardware specifics from software.