In order to meet today’s high storage and processing demands, many IT organizations must deploy multiple servers, each operating at a fraction of their capacity. This leads to high operating costs and inefficiencies.
This is where virtualization comes in. A virtual computer system is created by simulating hardware functionality with software. IT organizations can run multiple virtual systems – and multiple operating systems and applications – on a single server. This results in economies of scale and greater efficiency. Server virtualization adoption also grew thanks to additional benefits such as application isolation, greater workload portability, improved scalability, and high availability options. These advances ultimately helped businesses get more out of their hardware and “do more with less.”
A virtual computer system is called a “virtual machine” (VM): a software container containing an operating system and applications. These VMs are independent of each other. The VM technology enables several operating systems and applications to run on just one physical computer, or “host.”
By using a thin layer of software called a “hypervisor,” virtual machines can be isolated from their host and computing resources can be reassigned dynamically as needed.
With the advent of cloud computing, collaboration, infrastructure agility, and nimble workloads have become essential. The use of virtualization in this context enables the cloud characteristics mentioned above.
For ISVs and enterprises, virtualization is the main change protagonist for managing, deploying and delivering IT experiences in the right way. The benefit of virtualization is that it optimizes both old and new infrastructure at the same time. Additionally, virtual machines integrate easily with different systems, enabling hassle-free maintenance of applications as well as quicker server deployment.
Reducing infrastructure costs, optimizing workloads, and integrating scalability in your IT infrastructure. Virtualization brings the future to your business environment.
Virtualization is a technology that provides a layer between the computer hardware and the software that runs on it. Virtualization solutions provide a logical view rather than a physical view of computing resources. They allow you to trick operating systems into believing that a collection of servers is one pool of computing resource. Virtualization solutions can also allow you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on one machine.
Partitioning is the basis of virtualization. It divides one physical server into multiple servers. Each logical server can run its own operating system and applications once the physical server has been divided. Virtualization was first used in the 1990s to recreate end-user environments using a single mainframe. Virtualization technology was used to create different user environments if you were an IT administrator who wanted to roll out new software but wanted to see how it would run on a Windows NT machine or a Linux computer.
Virtualization is a hot topic in the industry. As new vendors enter the market and enterprise software providers incorporate virtualization into their products, this nice-to-have technology has quickly become gotta-get technology. The reason is that virtualization continues to provide tangible benefits, increasing its value for every enterprise organization at every step.
Server consolidation is definitely the main draw here. Virtualization is the most popular money-saving strategy for enterprises. According to industry analysts, between 60 and 80 percent of IT departments are looking into server consolidation projects. It’s clear why: Companies are seeking significant cost savings by reducing the number and type of servers they use to support business applications.
A lower power consumption from both the servers and the cooling systems of the facilities, as well as a greater use of underutilized computing resources, results in a longer data center life and higher profits. A smaller server footprint also makes it easier to manage and maintain.
Market watchers say most organisations have started exploring virtualization with application testing and development. Since its inception, virtualization has become a popular tool for software engineers. Virtualization allows developers working on a single workstation to write code that runs in several environments, and more critically, to test that code. In general, this is a noncritical setting – perfect for testing.
As soon as application development is complete and the server farm is a single pool of computing resources, storage and network consolidation will follow. Included in this list of benefits are high availability, catastrophe recovery, and task balancing.
Aside from the potential cost benefits, virtualization can improve an organization’s agility greatly. Organizations that use virtualization techniques to configure groups of servers into reusable pools of resources are better positioned to respond to changing business demands.
This technology may also affect the way IT managers think about computer resources. When controlling individual boxes becomes less difficult, IT can focus on the services that technology can give.
Every IT department is being challenged to perform more with less, and resource utilisation is the new buzzword of today. By pooling different computing resources into shareable pools, virtualization technologies directly achieve this objective.
Analysts estimate that the average enterprise uses between 5% and 25% of its server capacity. In those companies, idle cycles consume most of the hardware’s power. Using virtualization to consolidate unused x86 servers in the data centre saves money both upfront and over time.
The reduction in the number of servers in the data centre has the most immediate impact. Less machines equals less daily power use, both from the servers and the cooling devices that protect them from overheating.
A seamless computing pool can reduce future hardware costs by taking use of utility pricing models and pay-per-use programmes. A server virtualization plan can also free up crucial rack space for future expansion.
A more streamlined server farm allows for better administrator deployment.
According to Gartner’s latest report on x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, about 80% server workloads can be virtualized. And HyperV (our close partnership platform) is among the top virtualization platform most businesses use for server virtualization.
Ever wonder why server virtualization is so popular? Virtualization technology (and to an extent, HyperV) has many benefits for your business. Let’s take a look at them all.
Virtualization flexibility is one of its greatest assets. For example, if my SQL server needs more resources at the end of the month to generate reports, all it takes is a few clicks to add (or remove) those resources. Non-virtualized environments make this type of operation much more challenging, sometimes even impossible. Plus, virtualization allows this whole process to be automated.
Virtualization also offers mobility. Virtualization allows you to move OS and applications to other hosts within a cluster without having to reinstall everything. You can also move a VM from one host to another faster, without causing any disruption to your infrastructure. This ensures high availability and allows you to save a lot of time.
Companies often experience budget overruns because of resource usage. Virtualization for your company in Selangor or Kuala Lumpur allows for greater hardware utilization, which means that you won’t need as many physical servers to run your LOB (line-of-business) applications.
Instead of spending money on dedicated hardware, invest in a few servers to support Hyper-V and virtualize all workloads. This will result in fewer hardware purchases, which means less space, less power consumption, and so forth.
Let’s look at the actual cost here. Virtualization costs more than hardware. This is often due to the hypervisor licensing or cost. There are many hypervisors available, including Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESXi. Citrix XenServer, RedHat Enterprise Virtualization, RedHat Enterprise Virtualization, Citrix XenServer, RedHat Enterprise Virtualization, Citrix XenServer, RedHat Enterprise Virtualization, and Citrix XenServer.
Hyper-V, however, is best if your infrastructure relies on Windows Server OS. It’s included in the Windows Server license. You can enable Hyper-V by selecting a checkbox from the Add/Remove Features menu.
The built-in features in Windows Server are usually sufficient, making cost savings visible for smaller or larger infrastructures. The other advantage is the low cost of training. Hyper-V is built on Windows and administrators should find it easy to manage and understand. However, for large environments, additional management may be necessary. Microsoft System Center can do this – and the cost of additional software will be minimal.
More efficient hardware utilization
On-premise data centres, which have dedicated servers to each workflow, face the biggest problem of all data centres: low hardware utilization. In order to prevent their line-of-business (LOB) applications from working slowly or even stopping, companies overbuy their servers in order to keep up.
These servers are often under 20% in resource utilization, meaning they aren’t being used to their full potential. In what ways can you take advantage of a higher server utilization? The answer is virtualization.
If you have five servers with 20% utilization on a physical server that hosts an application, you can implement five VMs on the same server. For multi-tier applications, each application can have its own environment or several others. In reality, there are several more aspects to consider, like redundancy or VM peaks. Hyper-V allows you to consolidate multiple workloads on one server, and takes full advantage of your hardware.
Catastrophic failures can happen at any time, whether it’s a hardware problem, software glitch, malware, or human error. It is important to have a disaster-recovery (DR) environment that you can quickly fail over in case your main site goes down.
For a secondary data center, you can use popular public clouds (such as Microsoft Azure) or another data center located in another part of your city, another country, or around the world. With Hyper-V, replicating VMs to a DR site could not be easier — they could be replicated using Hyper-V Replica or third-party tools.
During replication, production changes are transferred to the replica VM based on a schedule, which allows you to failover VMs to the second site when necessary. You can also test replicas for reliability by following a few simple steps. Ultimately, Hyper-V offers a great replication solution for your virtual machines at an affordable price.
Virtualization comes with its own limitations. Nothing is all-powerful.
On a dedicated database server, a highly loaded database is slightly faster than one on a virtual machine because of the hypervisor overlay. It’s important to realize, however, that this only occurs under special conditions, and although the database on the physical server will likely be faster, the difference is so small that it is negligible.
Virtualization can also be problematic for applications that have very specific requirements. Applications with specific requirements, such as Microsoft Clusters or Oracle RAC, or guest clustering, and applications that rely on hardware components which cannot be virtualized, are not good candidates for virtualization.
With so many VMs running on your server, which part of the infrastructure is going to be most critical? Yes, the host. If it fails, all VMs will cease to work on that server.
A healthy hypervisor implementation must also have high availability (can be done through host clustering), backups and an efficient DR strategy (can either be done using Hyper-V Replica, or in a more advanced manner by Veeam Backup & Replication).
Either way, expect the best quality of services from Asia E-Pros as we help you design and implement a virtualization system from top to bottom that will overcome all limitations.
There are three main types of virtualization.
1. Storage virtualization merges physical storage from multiple network storage units to make them appear one storage device.
2. Network virtualization allows computing resources to be combined by splitting bandwidth into separate channels that can be assigned to specific servers or devices in real-time.
3. Server virtualization conceals the physical nature and identities of the server resources from the software that runs on them.
Server virtualization is the most popular application of technology and is widely considered to be the main driver of the market. Virtualization is the most common term used by people to refer to server virtualization.
Asia E-Pros offers consulting services to Malaysian companies looking to increase productivity and reduce IT infrastructure costs. By adopting virtualization, IT infrastructure and energy consumption can be reduced and workloads can be controlled across data centers.
Using its expertise on market-leading platforms such as VMware, Asia E-Pros Virtualization Consulting Services delivers end-to-end solutions. As experts, we can assist organizations with switching to a virtualized IT environment and meeting the demand for more efficient IT operations.
The virtualized environment simply offers a smarter, more agile platform for supporting your business’ most important priorities. It also sets the stage for serious business benefits now and in the future. Get started today.