Virtualisation Overview

Virtualisation Overview

In a business world which is increasingly competitive, reducing costs, enhancing performance and increasing flexibility can be essential to ensuring business success and profitability. This is where virtual environments come into their own.  Virtualisation is the creation of a virtual version of something rather than an actual version of it. This can bring many benefits to businesses including:

• Huge cost savings for example; hardware costs are reduced because less servers are required for purchase. In many businesses there are numerous computers which are using less than 20% of their total resources. However with Virtualised solutions you can use fewer computers using 70% of their total resources. In effect less computers will be working harder.
• More flexibility as employees can access all their applications remotely - meaning they can access the system from anywhere in the world providing they have an internet connection.
• More space in the office or Data Centre as there will be a reduced number of servers.
• Applications will run better as they will not interfere with each other.

Essentially through Virtualisation businesses can improve the efficiency and availability of their IT resources and applications. Organisations will no longer have the problem of having one server and one application as they will be able to run multiple virtual machines on each physical machine.

So what is Virtualisation?

Here's an analogy which puts Virtualisation into simple terms.

Imagine computers as people walking up steps. Each person has to use their own energy to get up the steps. This is wasteful because the energy could be used elsewhere. However, if you imagine virtualisation as escalators, instead of lots of people using their own energy they are all being carried by one escalator and are therefore not using as much energy.

Virtualisation Overview