Managing a server farm brings many challenges with it.
Most IT Managers will be familiar with the difficulty of managing server sprawl, with single applications occupying under-utilized servers and dedicated DR infrastructures. Access to storage compounds the problem with even more under-utilized hardware in the form of dedicated storage systems.
Not only is it expensive, but it’s difficult to manage and time-consuming to make changes or introduce new servers.
Virtualisation is a technology that solves these problems and reduces costs at the same time. It allows servers and storage to be treated as a single pooled resource which it then divides up virtually. It creates virtual machines which can be utilized optimally and installed or decommissioned in minutes.
It’s easy to see why it is being adopted by IT managers everywhere.
So what is Virtualisation? Simply put the term describes changing the operating environment from being physical device based to Virtual device based. In the case of Server Virtualisation, physical servers are managed as one pooled resource which is then divided up into multiple instances of Virtual Servers –allowing them to be created, moved and optimized in just a few minutes.
Virtualisation can be applied to memory and storage too. With virtual memory, for example, computer software effectively gains access to more memory than is physically installed, via the background swapping of data to disk storage. Similarly, virtualisation techniques can be applied to other IT infrastructure layers - including networks, storage, laptop or server hardware, operating systems and applications.
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