Katrix - Virtualisation

VIRTUALISATION

Introduction

Without virtualization, cloud computing would not exist or would be in a very different form. Yet you don't have to build your own private or hybrid cloud to take advantage of the benefits of the virtualization technology. Small and medium size businesses can still make use of virtualization's enterprise class capability to improve their in house systems and reduce costs. Surprisingly, virtualization is very affordable to start with. How affordable? How about free!

Consolidation of Hardware

Most servers are designed to serve one purpose so you would need more of them. The answer is server virtualization, the creation of multiple “virtual” servers via software and using only one or few real server hardware to do it. A powerful server can create numerous virtual machines with each having its own hardware specification like CPU speed, RAM size, and storage capacity. Each one of these virtual machines can be put to a single use, providing they do not all require vast amounts of computing resources. This means that we are able to host multiple applications and services on a single or small group of physical servers, a very efficient use of hardware resource.

Testing and Development

Single virtual machines or simulation of a group of production servers can be created or converted from existing computers easily for testing new system upgrades and software implementation. Full and incremental backups plus snapshots at various stages can be created for reversing changes in case of errors or failures.

For development, the use of a VM enables rapid deployment by isolating the application in a known and controlled environment. Unknown factors such as mixed libraries caused by numerous installs can be eliminated.

Scalability

Since each virtual server is allocated only enough computing power and storage capacity that its functions demands, more virtual servers can be created within a physical box. If the needs grow, more power and capacity can be allocated to that particular server, or vice versa if demands fall. In public cloud, clients only pay for how much computing power and capacity they are using, making it very affordable.

High Availability

The capability of virtualization in load balancing between servers plus real time replication of virtual machines among different network storage locations can eliminate performance bottleneck and downtime. For example, when a physical server fails, affected virtual machines are automatically restarted on other production servers with spare capacity. In the case of an operating system failure, the control system restarts the affected virtual machine on the same physical server.

Affordable

Both the Windows Hyper-V server of Microsoft and the vSphere (ESXi) server from VMware are provided to users free of charge. These free goodies are already sufficiently powerful to provide great benefits to the operations of small to medium size business. You only have to pay when you need extra advanced functions like running cluster(s) of virtual systems with automatic load balancing in regard to processing, network and storage usages.