While
every advancement in technology is intended to represent an improvement
in the way things have been done that doesn’t mean this progress comes
without
issues. How far this technology takes us and the advantages we are able
to achieve because of it will always depend on how well we address
these potential problems. This is particularly true in the world of
business as these technological advancements continue
to define how companies run their daily operations.
As
it is, the advancement of virtualization offers companies a more
efficient and productive method to manage their information. Gone are
the days of the
multi server environment in which companies dedicated significant
resources just to maintain the health of their operating systems and
applications. What virtualization has offered in return is a platform
that is capable of eliminating the costs associated
with that multi server environment while promoting innovation and
development to further advance a company.
This
is possible because with virtualization a company places all of their
information, like operating systems and applications, on a single
physical machine
and all of this information can be accessed through different virtual
computers. These virtual computers actually share the resources that are
stored on the physical machine which has essentially made the multi
server environment obsolete.
Of
course this is a welcome relief to companies who have been operating
multiple servers to manage their information as they are well aware of
the issues
associated with such an environment. Those issues include the
incredible cost of just keeping those servers running, the considerable
amount of time spent by IT admins carrying out basic tasks like updates,
recovery, archiving, and backups, as well as the
waste of storage capacity associated with placing a single operating
system or application on each server- this underutilization equates to
wasted dollars spent on purchasing and powering these servers.
Virtualization
has an answer for each of those issues. With all of the information on a
single physical machine IT admins can quickly carry out the basic
tasks, becoming more efficient with their time and affording them the
opportunity to concentrate on innovation and development. Because
virtualization centers information on one physical machine it eliminates
the costs associated with running those multiple
servers and with everything on a single machine virtualization can
actually maximize its storage capacity.
These
advantages are attracting more and more companies to virtualization
platforms, recognizing that the efficiency and productivity that they
afford are
essential in this particularly difficult financial climate. It can’t be
forgotten that virtualization is an advancement in technology and as
such it too comes with issues. These issues include 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.
These
can become serious problems for the virtualization infrastructure and
if they are ignored they can eliminate any of the benefits that the
technology
was intended to provide. This is why it is imperative that companies
pay close attention to their health and fortunately this can be a simple
process, installing virtualization software.
Virtualization software is the most effective
tool to protect a virtualization infrastructure from those issues described and V-locity, designed by
Diskeeper Corporation, is the most valuable virtualization software
available. With V-locity a company can eliminate the bottleneck issue by
creating a faster and more efficient computing platform for new
consolidation and provisioning initiatives without
the need to add additional hardware, eliminate competition for shared
I/O resources by coordinating resource usage, and solve the virtual disk
“bloat” problem by compacting the virtual disk, thereby preventing
waste and allowing IT managers to better allocate
their virtual storage resources.
Knowing
that the days of the multi server environment are now behind them
companies are quickly adopting virtualization for the management of
their information.
To ensure that their virtualization platforms are operating at their
peak level these companies should always install virtualization software
to get the most from their technology.