News / Business
Maximize the Potential of Virtualization Infrastructures with Virtualization Software Capable of Increasing Speed and Reducing Wasted Space
Simply put, IT admins have become bogged down with managing multiple servers, hardware that is critical to the daily business operations of a company. For security reasons many companies separate their operating systems and applications on individual servers, ensuring that if something were to go wrong with one then it wouldn’t affect the others. This security measure actually presents a number of other problems for an IT department and can contribute to a considerable amount of waste for a company.
Managing multiple servers is a time-consuming task for IT admins who are already stretched thin by budget cuts and resource scale backs, and making sure that these servers are running properly leaves little time for innovation. This means that while an IT department should be paving the way for development they are instead forced to simply make repairs to the existing path, a practice that will ultimately leave them behind the companies who have a better solution.
An often overlooked area of waste related to managing multiple servers is tied to space; a server that hosts a single operating system or application is operating at a fraction of its capacity. These operating systems and applications may be separated to minimize the damage caused by a potential crash or outage but the costs associated with keeping this security practice in place can be extreme. Companies are often utilizing less than half of what a server is capable of handling, and in many cases it is far lower. Given the cost of servers along with the costs associated with keeping them running this can be a serious financial burden and eat up much of an IT budget.
Of course technology has never been one to settle and innovation still exists which is why virtualization has become the favored method of solving the problems associated with the multiple server approach.
Virtualization has made it possible for companies to place all of their operating systems and applications on one physical computer and those resources can then be accessed by multiple virtual machines with each of those machines sharing the resources of the one physical computer. What this does is consolidate operating systems and applications that have been spread across multiple servers and places them on one physical computer and each of those operating systems and applications can run safely and have access to the resources it needs at any moment. While these operating systems and applications are all stored on a physical computer each one is securely stored in their own space, ensuring that if a problem existed with one it wouldn’t be a problem for the others.
The benefits of virtualization platforms have been considerable for companies as the technology has not only eliminated the dollar costs associated with managing multiple servers it has also eliminated the costs associated with falling behind in the areas of innovation and development. With everything securely placed on one physical computer IT admins can quickly carry out the basic functions like backup, archiving, and recovery while also managing, securing, and upgrading desktops and notebooks that are utilized by the company.
Maximizing the benefits of virtualization remains the job of the company and to do this they must be aware of the issues that can affect their virtualization infrastructure. Most notable are rapid I/O bandwidth bottlenecks due to accelerated fragmentation on virtual platforms, virtual machine competition for shared I/O resources are not being effectively prioritized across the platform, and virtual disks set to dynamically grow do not resize when data is deleted- wasting free space.
These issues aren’t something an IT admin has to live with; they can easily be remedied with virtualization software that can maximize the performance of any virtual platform. Companies like Diskeeper have been at the forefront of designing virtualization software that eliminates the problems that can arise from the technology. For their part Diskeeper offers V-locity software as a virtual platform disk optimizer which effectively synchronizes the complex and ongoing activity between host and multiple guest operating systems in a virtualized environment.
V-locity effectively alleviates that ‘virtual’ disk bottleneck for virtual machines which in turn creates a faster and more efficient computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives without the need to add additional hardware. The virtualization software is also capable of coordinating resource usage so that the competition for shared I/O resources is better handled. V-locity also frees up vital storage resources by eliminating virtual disk “bloat,” this is the wasted disk space that occurs takes when virtual disks are set to dynamically grow but don’t then shrink when users or applications remove data. This is done through V-locity’s efforts in compacting the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.
As more and more companies adopt their own virtual infrastructure to advance their business what can’t be overlooked is the necessity to keep that virtual platform operating at its potential. By simply installing virtualization software like V-locity a company can be assured that they are maximizing all benefits tied with the technology and concentrate on the innovation and development that is essential to the growth of their business.
