What are the benefits of Virtualisation?

March 02, 2011

Lower costs in the data centre are the basic attraction to all enterprise technologies, this is something virtualisation does promise. In addition, virtualisation reduces hardware maintenance costs via a simple process of packaging physical servers up and hosting several of them on one large server.

Virtualisation technology can also help lower energy bills, allowing businesses to claim green credentials, and it makes provisioning a server much, much faster; it only takes a few minutes to set one up, making the whole system much more flexible.

It works by decoupling the software from the hardware. In practice, this means that a virtual server can contain exactly the same software components – operating system, utilities and application software – as before but instead of running on the hardware directly, it runs inside a sandbox created by a virtualisation hypervisor such as Vmware’s ESX or Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

The virtualisation software divides up physical resources, such as CPU, disk and memory, and allocates these resources to the servers as they need them. In this way, It enables your business to have multiple servers running Windows or Linux, for example, on a single piece of hardware. A host server running a hypervisor can run as many virtual servers, or virtual machines (VMs), as it has resources for. The result is a higher ratio of virtual servers to each host.

The virtualisation trend is on its way up. Before it became a widespread trend during the mid-2000s, only about 10 per cent of servers were virtualised as many of the larger companies waited for reference sites to appear; savvy IT managers didn’t get where they are today by jumping blindly into the brand new virtualisation technology. Those reference sites have now appeared and a report recently released by Gartner suggests that 25 per cent of servers are now virtualised, with the proportion of virtualised servers likely to rise to over 80 per cent by 2012.

Industry News

servers vmware virtualisation server data centre virtualised