Concept
Virtualisation is a wide term that refers to the
abstraction of IT resources. Nowadays, it is being applied to all
environments of technology, from whole information systems to individual
resources or capacities.
It is a key focus in modern data
centres as virtualisation technologies allow physical characteristics to
be minimised. Encapsulation of technical details and IT resources allow
organisations to improve the efficiency and availability of their
resources and applications.
key elements of virtualisations are:
- Resource sharing — one physical resource (servers, operating systems, applications, communication networks, or storage devices) can be defined as several virtual resources.
- Resources aggregation — several physical resources can be defined as one virtual resource.
- Emulation — virtual resources can deliver services that are not available in the underlying physical resources.
- Isolation — abstraction of physical resources allows an isolation level that is not possible to obtain sharing physical resources in a traditional way.
Virtualisation (or physical consolidation) is the base of two further IT
infrastructure optimisation phases — logical consolidation and
rationalisation.
Physical consolidation enables a reduction in
the horizontal growth; logical consolidation enables workloads to be
shared between several virtual machines placed in different physical
machines.
Rationalisation allows for the identification of
unnecessary or redundant applications that can be eliminated.
Virtualisation,
as a technology enabler, will provide scalability and agility to
organisations and is being used massively by Cloud Computing service
providers.
Trajectory
Virtualisation can simply be a way to reduce and
simplify the IT infrastructure and associated costs, or it can become a
method to transform the global vision of the data centre.
Virtualisation
dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of resources and
applications, and can also be used as ‘hot standby’ environment for
physical production servers. This leads to an improvement and reduction
in the costs of providing disaster recovery solutions.
Virtualisation
reduces hardware maintenance costs because of a lower number of
physical devices. By implementing a server consolidation strategy, the
space utilisation and energy efficiency of the data centre can be
increased. Beyond, there are personnel savings as fewer administrators
are required for the fewer machines.
Extending virtualisation to a
desktop environment allows user mobilisation by achieving new
computational models, and protecting critical information at data centre
levels.
Creating virtual architecture by moving the computing
workload that sits on physical servers to a smaller number of virtual
servers, IT departments can leverage their storage, network, and other
computing resources to control costs, simplify deployment, and respond
faster to business needs.
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