Virtualization is one of the most profound enterprise technological developments in the modern era and they have completely changed the way data centers perform.
It’s about the process of creating a software-based virtual environment, which is made up of virtual desktops, servers, storage, and even network.
It has reduced IT expenses and enhanced the agility of businesses and enabled companies to create multiple IT services for which they had to earlier depend on the traditional IT hardware.
It helps them utilize their servers more efficiently.
Before the advent of virtualization, most enterprises depended on physical servers.
Additionally, single-vendor IT stacks prohibited legacy apps to run on the server of another vendor on completely different hardware.
With virtualization coming into the picture; companies could partition their servers completely.
Now servers were being used more efficiently, which brought down the cost associated with their purchase, set up, cooling, and maintenance.
The firm’s dependence on vendors came down significantly and it also set the foundation of cloud computing.
Advantages of Virtualisation
Let’s suppose you have three physical servers for distinct purposes: first one is a mail server, the second one is a web server, and the last one hosts legacy applications.
Each server just uses one-third of the capacity.
Though the server hosting legacy application is under-used, there is no way you can do without them. With virtualization, you can split the mail server into two unique servers.
Now one part shares the load of the legacy applications and it eliminates the need to have a third server completely.
So your servers become more efficient because of this arrangement.
It has different layers at the level of desktop, server, files, storage, and network that helps in optimum utilization and power saving. It also decreases your data-center footprints.
Types of Virtualisation
Here are the 5 major virtualization services:
- Network Virtualisation
By reproducing physical network, network virtualization enables applications to run efficiently on a virtual network.
They don’t require a physical network to accomplish many tasks and it’s much more hardware independent.
It presents logical ports, routers, firewalls, VPNs, and also shares the most connected workload.
2. Data virtualization
This enables an enterprise to consider all data as a dynamic supply and allows them to process them according to their business needs.
The goal is achieved by using data virtualization tools that fetch data from multiple sources and present them whenever you require.
This can be done easily as entire data is treated as a single source.
3. Desktop Virtualisation
It allows a central administrator to install and deploy a simulated desktop type environment to a large number of machines.
In traditional machines, desktop environment software is physically installed, configured, and updated.
With desktop virtualization, the same goal can be accomplished through mass configuration, updates, and security checks on all virtual desktops.
4. Server virtualization
With the help of server virtualization, both in-house data centers and service providers operate concurrently in the public cloud space, which allows them to utilize their server capacity to the fullest and also adds to the system flexibility.
They can scale up and down as per workload fluctuation.
5. Storage virtualization
It is fast becoming popular because it frees up IT managers from handling multiple units.
The goal is achieved by adding additional layers of a storage hypervisor that creates virtual pools of storage networks in a way that appears like a single storage pool.
It makes the task of data backup, recovery and archiving easier and faster.
