Your Top 3 Virtualization Questions Answered
- What is Virtualization?
The term virtualization can be hard to grasp, that’s because there is nothing to physically grasp! By creating a resource that doesn’t physically exist, virtualization is more of a stand in for a physical resource such as a CPU, memory, storage media, and Input/Output. With virtualization, you can run multiple virtual computers on the same physical computer. This provides additional computing power for operations or testing, without the added expense and space of more physical computers. - How Does Virtualization Work?
Virtualization is a non-physical operating system, server, storage device, or network resource. Virtual computers are hardware agnostic and their operating systems all run on top of your physical computer. It’s like a computer within a computer - a computer inception, if you will.
There are two types of desktop virtualization:
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) – This allows many desktops to run on the main server and then be streamed to users through virtual machines. In this way, virtualization gives an organization’s users access to a variety of operating systems (OS) from any device.
Local Desktop Infrastructure – It runs a hypervisor, or virtual machine monitor, on a local computer, which enables users to run one or more extra operating systems on that computer. You can also easily switch from one operating system to another without changing anything on the primary (or underlying) operating system.
- Why Should I Use Virtualization within My Business?
There are several reasons why you may want to use virtualization within your business. First off, virtualization is a popular way to save money on hardware costs, backups, administration through server consolidation, and running multiple servers on a single physical machine. Desktop virtualization is also popular for running client operating systems in a virtual machine for training purposes and testing new software or patches before rolling updates out to your entire network. It can also save money on power consumption and help drive green initiatives.
Modern cloud virtualization providers like Microsoft 365, Google Cloud, or Amazon web services have large datacenters and the ability to implement resources dynamically based on need. While some virtual servers must be on all the time as they are critical to operations, if you have heavier usage at certain times of day, with dynamic resources, more virtual servers can be automatically spun up to give your team more processing power and resources. When load on systems drops off, those additional servers can be automatically shutdown and removed. With this on-demand computing resource, you’ll have the ability to quickly scale up or down as needed This not only saves computing power but your bottom line as you only pay for what you need, when you need it.
Virtualization allows you to cluster your virtual operating systems across various server farms and data centers providing fault tolerance. If one physical piece of hardware dies, another one can quickly take over and resume function with no downtime.
If you're still on the fence about virtualization within your business, Contact CTTS today: (512) 388-5559, together we'll find the appropriate solution for your business today and for whatever tomorrow may bring.
By Kurt Rinear
Director of Technical Services
Central Texas Technology Solutions