Virtualization
In fact, virtualization is not a new technology but the advance of computer hardware has driven the importance of virtualization. Virtualization may address the following challenges, which are faced by most of companies today:
- Multiple servers with low utilization
- Increasing infrastructure and IT management cost
- Legacy applications running on aging hardware, i.e. server hardware may fail anytime
- Availability of information and applications
Virtualization allows you to mitigate these challenges. Below are the benefits of virtualization:
- Cost reduction by consolidating servers: reduce number of servers, energy bill, space and maintenance cost
- Business continuity by minimizing both scheduled and unplanned downtime
- Providing a platform to run legacy applications
- Avoiding application conflict by running each application on a different virtual machine
Virtualization software provides a hypervisor platform, which runs on a physical server. It enables multiple operating systems, so-called virtual machines, to run independently on top of the hypervisor. Hence hypervisor sits between physical server and virtual machines and facilitates the sharing of server resources, such as CPU, memory, network and hard disk.
By having at least two physical servers, you can build redundancy of the physical servers, which in turn will increase the availability of data and applications. If one of the physical servers is down due to maintenance or hardware failure, the virtual machines can be migrated to another physical server. In the event of a planned maintenance, the migration of virtual machines (so-called live migration) does not cause a perceived downtime.
By adhering to industry best practices for virtualization, we ensure smooth migration to virtualization. These best practices are observed during the migration phases, in order to effectively achieve virtualization goals.