Virtualization: Benefits, drawbacks and defining features
Virtualization helps to make IT more flexible, agile and scalable while also making IT easier to manage and less expensive to own.
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Virtualization is a standard practice in enterprise IT today, as its extensive applicability helps not only lessen vendor lock-in but also forms the foundation of cloud computing. The rise in popularity of virtualization over the years can be credited to it enabling enterprises to partition their servers and run legacy applications on more than one operating system type or version. But, what is virtualization?
Virtualization is the creation of a simulated computing environment in contrast with a physical environment. It refers to technology where applications, guest operating systems or data storage are abstracted from the actual underlying software or hardware. Virtualization enables users to build effective IT services from resources that are traditionally bound to hardware.
Virtualization allows organizations to partition a physical computer into many virtual machines. This enables organizations to run several operating systems, applications and virtual systems on one server. As a result, organizations enjoy increased performance, greater availability of resources, greater mobility of workloads and automated operations. The various types of virtualization include network, storage, data, server, application and desktop virtualization.
An advantage of using a virtualized environment is that disaster recovery is made easier. In such an environment, the backup and recovery of virtual machines is made feasible by consistent snapshots to provide up-to-date data. Virtualization makes it easy to move instances between physical servers.
Virtualization also reduces costs and saves up on physical resources. With virtualization, fewer hardware servers are needed in a company or data center, as it enables users to create many operating system instances by running on a single server. This results in lower costs of purchasing, installation, management and maintenance of large amounts of hardware. Virtualization also helps to reduce the risk of overheating physical servers and to improve energy savings.
In a virtual environment, testing becomes less complicated. Tests do not need to be stopped and restarted from the beginning in the event of a severe mistake. It is easy to restore a previous snapshot and carry on with the test.
Virtualization also leads to faster backups. Virtual servers and virtual machines can both be backed up. To ensure that data is updated, snapshots are automatically taken throughout the day. Additionally, it is easy to migrate virtual machines between each other and redeploy them effectively.
Migration to the cloud is made easier for companies through virtualization. Virtual machines play a part in enabling enterprises to adopt a cloud-based culture.
