With the advancement in technology, businesses and organizations strive to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their IT infrastructure systems.
They’re looking for strategies that help integrate emerging technologies to help them scale rapidly, store enormous data and ensure the safety of their information. Also, companies want to reduce their cost of operations and improve their market availability.
But to achieve this, organizations have to move their resources from a physical state to a more virtual state. Or rather, create a secure virtualized data system through virtualization.
What Is Virtualization?
Virtualization entails creating virtual computer machines (VMs) that allow companies to run multiple simulated systems from a single server or physical hardware.
The process is done through software known as a hypervisor. This application allows several operating systems to work alongside each other while sharing the same physical resources. Hypervisors also help companies slit their physical computer system into distinct, separate, secure units.
In a more simplified version, virtualization is a computing approach that enables single and physical hardware to act as multiple virtual units. Or where a simple physical computer acts as numerous virtual computers. The same computer will then run any independent operating systems on the same hardware.
Through the creation of multiple resources on one server or computer virtualisation increases the capacity of the system and results in the utilization of fewer servers in total as well as less energy usage as well as less infrastructure costs and upkeep. There are four major categories that virtualization can be classified into. The primary one is desktop virtualisation which allows a central server to provide and manage personalised desktops. Another is virtualisation of networks. It is designed to divide bandwidth of networks into distinct channels, which can later be allocated to specific devices or servers. The third is software virtualisation that separates software from hardware and operating system. Fourthly, there is storage virtualization that combines various storage resources on the network into one storage device, which many users can access. There is also application virtualization. We will briefly discuss about them in the next section.
Types of Virtualization
Virtualization comes in different forms, including:
Storage virtualization; involves the pooling of the physical means of resource storage into a single storage system managed from a central area. This allows users to archive and backup data for easy recovery.
Desktop virtualization; separates the desktop screen from the physical machine allowing individuals to access their monitor or files from any PC.
Application virtualization; allows users to deliver applications from any server direct to any end-user device, like tablets, laptops, or smartphones. Meaning users can easily access a network server from their devices provided they have access to the internet.
Server virtualization; allows multiple operating systems to operate or run on a single hardware or physical server completely independent of other servers.
Network virtualization; involves combining any physical network devices into a single and software-based system. It allows various applications to continue running just like they could on a physical network.
Importance of Virtualization
Virtualization is one of the latest business emerging trends that, when properly deployed, an organization can benefit in the following ways.
Boost Productivity and Efficiency.
With virtualization, especially server virtualization, the IT personnel will spend less time maintaining physical hardware and IT infrastructure with fewer servers.
Instead of going through the demanding and time-consuming process of applying updates server-by-server, they’ll be able to install, update, and maintain the environment across all virtual machines. The efficiency and production of staff will improve if they spend less time maintaining the environment.
Faster Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Response
When a physical server is damaged, someone is responsible for replacing or repairing it, which could take hours or even days. However, it’s simple and easy to deploy a virtualized environment, allowing you to replicate or clone the affected virtual machine.
The recovery process would take mere minutes instead of the hours required to provision and set up a new physical server. This significantly increases the environment’s resiliency, thus improving business continuity.
High Level of Availability
Because cloning a VM is so simple, you can set up duplicated virtualized environments with extremely high availability. Besides, virtualization provides an extremely reliable system with no single point of failure in hardware and software.
Also, it automatically monitors VM status and rapidly switches to backup VMs in the event of an outage. This allows organizations to seamlessly continue operating their VM from its previous working state, ensuring service availability is maximized irrespective of what goes wrong.
Easy Resource Migration
Virtualization allows you to transition from a physical to a virtual environment. Also, you can switch from a fully allocated virtual disk to a thinly provisioned one. This allows you to avoid resource waste by fitting only the required resources.
Reduced Cost Of Operation
The hardware cost certainly contributes to the overall cost of running and maintaining a reliable data center. However, as the number of hardware servers is reduced, so are the prices. Also, it’s easy to manage virtual servers to repair and fix physical servers.
Conclusion
Apart from boosting productivity and efficiency, virtualization has ensured that companies safely protect their data, reduce expenses, and improve their market or online availability. Also, organizations can easily migrate their resources from a physical to a virtual state, thus increasing their accessibility.
