Understanding Virtulisation

Virtualisation and consolidation

Amazing benefits and saving for organizations of any size

The benefits of virtualisation – lower infrastructure and maintenance costs, dynamic certralised management off applications and data, unprecedented staff mobility and simplifies business continuity provision – are now within the reach of even small organizations. Virtualization lets multiple operating systems and applications run on a single platform. That means not only a wider choice of software, but greatly reduced hardware requirements. Each real server or workstation does more, so you get maximum value from your hardware investment. Platform configuration is carried out on software not electronics, so administration, licensing and asset management are simplified. Every server can do everything any of the others does, so you get better business continuity without buying and maintaining redundant infrastructure. Acuutech has been using virtualization to provide its IT services to business since the technology was new and has unrivalled knowledge and understanding. Don’t climb a steep learning curve or risk making expensive mistakes yourself; start from a guaranteed ready-built virtualized environment.

Server consolidation

System monitoring tools show the utilization of a server’s central processing unit (CPU) – the chip that does the actual work. It’s typically low, perhaps 20% of its capability. A ‘green’ reading like that might be considered a good thing by an engineer. But shouldn’t the business that paid for that CPU be getting more? Instead, it probably needs further under-utilized CPUs – that is, additional servers – in order to run other applications that need a different OS and/or configuration. Virtualization is causing great excitement in the IT industry for many reasons. Its potential for solving long standing problems seems limitless. But from the business point of view, its most important advantage is that it lets you run both applications on one CPU. They don’t affect one another’s functionality or performance. The only time a new server is needed is if utilization does approach the limit – and the new one gives you another 100% to play with across all applications!

IT agility

In a ‘real’ environment, making an application available to a user often involves checking their workstation’s hardware and software configuration and upgrading if necessary, time-consuming installing and configuration of the application itself, and complex software licence management. In a virtual environment, it’s a matter of a few mouse clicks on an administration interface. Imagine your best technical people freed from repetitive manual work.

Availability and business continuity

Virtualisation combines multiple servers into one logical server, in the way a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) combines multiple hard drives into a single logical drive. If one of the servers fails, the others continue to serve all the applications. Infrastructure failure is no longer an outage issue; at worst it is a performance issue.

Mobility and security

Wherever in the world a user may be, their desktop environment is provided and controlled centrally, so sensitive data is not kept on the workstation and access to applications can be denied instantly in the event of physical security breach.