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Overview

Virtualization came into play from a poorly understood concept to a hyped industry buzzword. Even though other technologies are expensive and cannot be used by small businesses, virtualization is a mature technology which provides a layer of hardware abstraction that every organization can benefit.

Virtualization refers to virtualizing Operating systems. Wikipedia uses the term “platform virtualization” since the main concept of virtualization is to run an abstraction layer on a computer that emulates the hardware itself. With the combination of abstraction and emulation, a virtual machine is created, which is a full “workable” computer with the same facilities and functionality as a dedicated machine has. However, the main advantage of virtualization is to have many virtual machines (full “workable”) into one physical machine. As Dan Chu said, former vice president of VMWare, “Virtualization enables one server or computer to act as many”.

 Advantages

Any size of business can benefit from any kind or scale of virtualization. Some of these benefits are the following:

• Reducing power consumption: IT virtualization can reduce significantly power consumption hence is considered as a “green” technology. It is considered as a “reducing consumption technology” since instead of having several dedicated machines running one operating system each, you can have many machines reside on one physical.

• Cost reductions: This is one of the main advantages of virtualization since it is the main reason that companies migrating to virtual devices. Minimizing the costs of purchasing expensive hardware and avoiding the running expenses of several server machine, we can now deploy more systems at a lower cost per system.

• Ease of provisioning: Installing and configuring a new server on a new piece of hardware it is a very time-consuming process, hence, using virtualization it is a matter of minutes to install and configure new servers.

• Reduce operating expenses: Maintenance and administration costs are reduced since there is less hardware to maintain. Instead of having many physical servers to maintain, one physical server hosts many virtual which corresponds to less administration.

• More responsive IT staff: Especially for large organizations, IT staff can be more responsive since virtualization simplifies the IT infrastructure of the organization. IT staff can help the organization in a more business-oriented IT strategy and not to keep the current systems up and running since with using virtualization, all day-to-day operations are more simplified.

• Standardization: All the virtualization software runs on any AMD and Intel platforms, no matter what operating system you use.

• Resource accessibility: Using virtualization technology, all the physical resources are used including CPU, memory, storage, etc. However, virtualization helps your organization to use all the available hardware resources.

• Efficiency: Since multiple machines are running on a single physical server, your hardware is fully utilized.

• Mobility: Virtual machines can be provisioned, backed up and restored very easily with the minimum downtime.

• Flexibility: The IT team of your organization can continue and support older but mission-critical applications using virtual machines.

Avgoustinos Constantinides
IT Consultant
IBSAC Intelligent Business Solutions Ltd
http://www.ibs.com.cy