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Virtualization Infrastructures Offer Companies Best Opportunity to Develop Their Business, Virtualization Software Ensures Those Platforms Remain Productive
We have seen such a shift with the advancement of virtualization infrastructures, a means by which a company can move away from the costly multiple server environments to a more efficient and productive virtual platform environment that reduces costs while enhancing performance as well as innovation.
Virtualization platforms have become so critical to business simply because they offer a solution to the difficult climate companies find themselves facing today. With constant pressure to reduce their costs while at the same time expand their business the advancement of virtualization couldn’t have come at a more relevant moment for companies.
This is because the multiple server environments simply can’t provide any relief to this pressure, and this is because, in many cases, they are the main problem. There are a number of costs involved in maintaining and operating a multiple server environment, none of which can be justified now that virtualization has arrived. Something as basic as keeping these servers running can be incredibly expensive and when you add in the hours spent by IT admins to keep them up-to-date and free from problems the costs continue to mount.
In most multiple server environments IT admins dedicate more than half their time on basic tasks like updates, backup, archiving and recovery, as well as managing, securing and upgrading desktops for the company. It takes so long because a company has their information spread across so many servers, often times placing a single operating system or application on one server. What this means is that whenever these basic tasks are carried out by IT admins they have to be done for each individual server, a timely process to say the least.
The practice of operating under a multiple server environment also generates considerable waste, which ultimately affects a company’s bottom line. The majority of these servers are underutilized, with just a fraction of their storage capacity being occupied. This is common practice in a multiple server environment for security reasons as there is a fear that if all of the information were to be placed on a single server and something were to happen then all of the operating systems and applications would be affected.
Those concerns are eliminated with virtualization. Simply put virtualization allows a company to place all of their information on one physical machine and then access all of that information from virtual computers, all of which share the resources that exist on the physical machine. What this means is that different operating systems and applications can be accessed by these virtual computers, saving a considerable amount of time, space, and money that was needed in the multiple server environments.
Virtualization platforms have also eased the concerns over security by placing each of those operating systems and applications in their own protected space on the physical machine. If something were to go wrong with one of those operating systems or applications it wouldn’t carry over to the others. On top of that, it would be easier for IT admins to identify the problem and then fix it because it is so accessible.
While the benefits associated with virtualization are often quantified in dollars perhaps the biggest benefit afforded by the technology is the time it gives IT to innovate and develop new ideas for the company’s future. Growth only occurs when there is time to develop and this is exactly what virtualization offers.
Of course with every advance in technology, no matter how beneficial, there can be issues that slow down its performance and virtualization is no different. Issues like I/O bandwidth bottlenecks due to accelerated fragmentation on virtual platforms, virtual machine competition for shared I/O resources not effectively being prioritized across the platform, and virtual disks set to dynamically grow do not resize when data is deleted, resulting in free space being wasted can all occur on a virtualization platform.
While these issues can crop up they can also be quickly fixed and prevented with virtualization software like V-locity from Diskeeper Corporation. Acting as a virtual disk optimizer, V-locity delivers background optimization which in turn improves the operability and functionality of the virtualization platform. What this means is that V-locity can eliminate the issues related to bottlenecks by creating a faster and more efficient computing platform for new consolidation and provisioning initiatives without the need to add additional hardware, the virtualization software also eliminates competition for shared I/O resources by coordinating resource usage, and solves the virtual disk “bloat” problem by compacting the virtual disk, thereby preventing waste and allowing IT managers to better allocate their virtual storage resources.
Installing virtualization software is simply a guarantee that when a company embraces virtualization as an effective solution to cutting costs and expanding their business the performance of their virtualization platforms don’t disappoint.
