Virtualization – the future of IT?
What is Virtual Computing?
In fact, this is a quiet complex subject. There are lot of news, articles, reviews and in the wild. But only a few of them explain what it is actually about, and what is the scope. One can say that the technique of virtualization, or virtual computing, is used for many different scopes and purposes.
In general, it means that you create one or more virtual computer systems on one real device.
Some of you may wonder why one should do this: Why should I run a virtual computer system if I have a real one? This question is very valid, but once the answer is outlined properly to you, hopefully you will find it very valid as well. Let’s look at the vantages one after another .
The first reward is the most signifant one as well. It is actually the fact that, with virtual computers, you have a better use of the available system resources. This, in these times of a weak financial situation, is very important to many organizations around the world. So this leads us to the second advantage: Cost savings. How do virtual things save costs? It’s pretty obvious: Something which is virtual, does not physically exists, and therefore cannot cost (that much). In the field of in particular, you will save costs as you don’t need to buy and maintain a physical device for each virtual system you have. It is clear that buying and maintaining one powerful, physical computer is more economic than for example 12 smallercomputer.
Another advantage is the flexibility, which increases dramatically when you use virtual device: Virtual computing allows you to create a new machine within minutes. You can clone existing machines, you can make snapshots so that you can go back to a previous state of your machine, etc. This speeds up the process of deploying new systems within a company dramatically.
One of the side effects might be, however, the reduced need of personnel maintaining the systems, as you can install them much quicker, and if you have some serious trouble, you can just clone a working system and adapt it to your needs – and basically trash the old, virtual system which caused trouble. Again, at no cost at all.
The basic requirements for virtual computing are, as already said, a powerful host-computer because you have to share all system resources between your physical and all your virtual machines.
Virtual Computing is used by server administrators, so that they can host several servers on one physical machine. But also other people are using this technology. Programmers can use virtual environments in order to test their applications on the virtual machines, so that they do not need to use real computers for this. This is faster, more flexible and cheaper.
You can find a whole lot more information about virtualization available , but hopefully this article will help you to put all the information together and make sense to you. So far, happy virtualization to you folks out there!
If you want to learn more about virtual computers, click here to read a detailed article by our colleagues at IT-Space.NET!