In the official Huawei HCIA–Cloud Computing documentation, the core definition of virtualization centers on the abstraction of physical resources. The essence of virtualization technology is precisely the transformation of physical, hardware-based resources—such as CPUs, memory, network interface cards, and storage disks—into virtualized, logical entities. This process is facilitated by a software layer known as the Hypervisor or Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM). By creating this abstraction layer, virtualization effectively achieves the "decoupling" of the software environment (the Operating System and applications) from the underlying physical hardware.
This decoupling is a revolutionary shift from traditional computing architectures where an Operating System was tied to specific hardware drivers and physical configurations. In a virtualized environment, a Virtual Machine (VM) perceives a set of standardized, logical hardware components provided by the Hypervisor. Because the software is no longer bound to the physical machine, it gains significant mobility and flexibility. For example, in Huawei’s FusionCompute platform, this decoupling allows for features such as Live Migration, where a running VM can be moved from one physical host to another without any service interruption. This is possible because the VM's "logical" hardware remains consistent even as the "physical" host changes.
Furthermore, this transformation from physical to logical enables better resource utilization through overcommitment and sharing. Multiple logical servers can run on a single physical server, each isolated from the others. This fundamental shift is what provides the agility, scalability, and efficiency required for Cloud Computing. Without the decoupling provided by virtualization, the rapid provisioning and elastic resource scaling that define cloud services would be impossible to achieve. Therefore, virtualization serves as the indispensable technical foundation upon which all other cloud services and management layers are built within the Huawei ICT ecosystem.