How can virtualization
ability increase your
business performance?
You might be wondering why Virtualize? Why is virtualization important for my business and how will it translate in performance?
Let’s have a quick peek at small to midsize businesses and how are they navigating through this difficult economic climate.
IT budgets were and still are under a great deal of pressure, with the target regarding payback on IT investments increasing more and more as quarters go by.
What is Virtualization?
When a business decides to virtualize, some of the IT investments are becoming substantial opportunities for cost reduction, productivity improvements and enhanced business continuity, as virtualization is able to make your company more robust, agile, and responsive to the ever-changing economic conditions and business opportunities.
When properly utilizing technology, businesses found they are able to stay ahead of the competition and also respond to the needs of their customers and partners. All this is happening whilst allowing their IT department to become more responsive to business needs and begin to be seen as more of an innovating department able to drive new business initiatives instead of simply assisting to the existing operations.
Virtualization technology can save expenses and cut some costs; it can streamline your IT management, and improve the efficiency of your system.
In server virtualization, a hypervisor is deployed over the underlying hardware, this piece of software is acting as a stand-in for the actual server. It also allows multiple operating systems to be run off the same hypervisor, whilst sharing the server’s processing power without interfering with each other.
You can use this type of technology with multiple servers for better efficiency, therefore, instead of having one server for each and every operating system, you can have twelve operating systems on five servers.
It’s important to note that virtualization also provides other benefits and can help your business with continuity whilst completing data protection so your company can achieve continuous application availability and automated disaster recovery across physical sites.
Virtualization is what helps businesses to simplify backup and recovery of data and systems whilst increasing the responsiveness through improved efficiency and flexibility. All aforementioned are benefits that allow the IT department to be the department that helps drive innovation.
Disaster recovery is another strong point that virtualization holds, as businesses can repurpose existing servers for disaster recovery rather than needing to buy duplicate servers for rapid recovery.
How can virtualization technology help you grow and develop your business?
Virtualization technology can cut costs, streamline your IT management, and improve system efficiency for your business.
For instance, in server virtualization, the hypervisor software mentioned before is deployed over the underlying hardware. The hypervisor then acts as a stand-in for the actual server and supports the creation and management of virtual machines by abstracting the software installed on a computer from the computer’s hardware. Hypervisors make virtualization possible by translating requests between the physical and virtual resources. Basically, the hypervisor will be used with multiple servers for greater efficiency.
Rather than having one server per operating system, you can have twelve operating systems of five servers. The hypervisor keeps the operating systems separate while sharing the server processing power between them.
Advantages of Utilizing Virtualization
To remain vigilant is a must in today’s IT world, as new technologies that will help you run your business with fewer resources are being rolled out, whilst providing the structure and set-up necessary to meet the customer needs.
It's safe to say that virtualization technology is the advancement of enterprise information technology and a good blueprint of how the future will look like.
Server Consolidation
It’s quite normal to attain 10:1 virtual to a physical machine. This means that 10 server applications will be able to work on only one physical machine at the same time.
Legacy software can uphold the old and former OS configurations, just as fresh applications are working in Virtual Machines with modernized platforms, even though a server that supports many Virtual Machines will most likely have CPUs, more memory, and added hardware, the server will use next to no power at all, and also it will take up the same physical space, therefore providing a helping hand in decreasing the real-estate and utility costs that follow any server maintenance.
Testing and Developing
Time is money.
The use of a Virtual Machine allows for quick development and speedy deployment procedures.
Just by separating the apps in a controlled and known environment from the potentially grave and serious crashes that would’ve taken 60 minutes of reinstallation, will now take just a few minutes.
Disaster Recovery and Dynamic Load Balancing
It’s nothing but common sense and well-known fact that server capacities may vary, therefore virtualization offers the capability for virtual machines that are over-utilizing the properties of a server to be shifted to underutilized servers.
That’s how an effective consumption of server resources through dynamic load balancing is created.
Disaster recovery is considered to be just one of the most critical features because if a system crashes, it can create a massive economic loss, but fortunately, with the help of virtualization technology, virtual images can be facilitated on a machine, and this allows the re-image to be done instantly on a different server if a machine failure might happen.
Improved System Security and Reliability
System crashes can actually be prevented by making good use of the now established virtualization technology.
It’s important to know that there can exist various and multiple reasons for a system to crash.
Maybe the reason is related to memory corruption triggered by software such as device drivers. In cases like this virtualization is providing a great way to better govern system devices by outlining the architecture for Direct Marketing Access.
In Conclusion
Virtualization is a powerful tool that should be used to relieve administrative overhead whilst increasing cost optimization, scalability, and efficiency.
Virtualization has been created decades ago, but it continues to represent a catalyst for companies’ IT strategies with its importance being exponentially accelerated as companies tend to start their IT modernization journey.