Virtualisation grabs the baton

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: Virtualisation started out decades ago as a way to make better use of large, expensive, mainframe computers. While the IT landscape has changed dramatically since then, virtualisation continues to be adopted by businesses looking to optimise the use of their existing server resources and, in turn, lower IT costs.

The benefits of virtualisation extend to mid-sized businesses as well. With more and more applications and data to protect and manage, these growing companies are implementing virtualisation to make better use of hardware, lower costs, and increase business agility.

A growing number of virtualisation solutions are emerging that target mid-sized businesses. Microsoft recently released its Hyper-V solution, its latest entry into the virtualisation market, while virtualisation pioneer VMware introduced its new ESXi 3.5 for small businesses. These offerings are currently available as free downloads.

Before implementing server virtualisation, small businesses must understand what this technology does and then assess their own environment. Are common applications running on a variety of different servers in the organisation? Is the organisation dealing with more and more applications? Do these applications support virtualisation? Is the increase in applications straining current server capacity?

The most popular virtualisation solutions today are based on a hypervisor, which is a layer of software that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system so that multiple operating systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer. VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenSource are hypervisor-based.

In many ways, a virtual machine acts like a physical computer by running its own operating systems and applications. Like its physical counterparts, the virtual machine has its own CPU, RAM, hard disk, and network interface card—but in virtual form (that is, done in software).

The beauty of virtualisation is that to an operating system or an application, a virtual machine looks just like a physical machine. In reality, however, the virtual machine has no hardware components; it is made up entirely of software. This means a user can run nearly any software on a virtual machine that they would run on a physical machine.

Virtualisation enables a business to do more with less. It removes the traditional one-to-one application-to-server relationship and allows the organisation to run multiple applications on a single physical piece of hardware. By doing this, mid-sized businesses not only experience better resource utilisation but also conserve space and energy—all of which can have a significant impact on the bottomline.