Without a doubt the concept of virtualization is taking the business world by a storm. Few of us if any remember the adaptation of a technology as fast as virtualization is being adopted. Why? First off, what is virtualization? Virtualization is taking a piece of hardware (a switch, a server, a workstation, a firewall, etc.) and encapsulating it into a software file or package which in turn will run on a server such that it can function exactly as it would as a piece of hardware. Why is that good? One would think that running a copy of a piece of hardware on itself would be rather inefficient, sort of like looking at an image in a mirror that is looking at the image in a mirror infinite times.
Virtualizing an item (a virtual image) can be very beneficial because it becomes hardware independent. It no longer matters what equipment it resides on. Secondly, a virtualized piece of equipment can be installed such that it can share a single piece of hardware with another virtualized image.
It is these two facts that makes the concept of virtualization such a hot topic. Because a virtual image no longer cares what hardware it is running on and virtual images can share resources of the same equipment, a network can be designed to maximize these traits. Most computers use only a small fraction of the available resources. As such most servers and other computers are underutilized and therefore cost much more that it really should. Further, since multiple images reside on the same piece of hardware, maintenance is much lower. Even further, disaster recovery becomes greatly simplified because a virtual image can be copied from one machine to another and be up and running within a matter of just a few minutes. Compare that with the last time your company had a server fail. It took a minimum of hours to restore and most likely was more than a day (depending on how the backup was designed).
VMWare invented the concept of virtualization and is the world’s leading expert in it. They have done it longer and better than anybody else and it is the reason we have invested our time and resources to train, use and implement VMware.
Virtualizing an item (a virtual image) can be very beneficial because it becomes hardware independent. It no longer matters what equipment it resides on. Secondly, a virtualized piece of equipment can be installed such that it can share a single piece of hardware with another virtualized image.
It is these two facts that makes the concept of virtualization such a hot topic. Because a virtual image no longer cares what hardware it is running on and virtual images can share resources of the same equipment, a network can be designed to maximize these traits. Most computers use only a small fraction of the available resources. As such most servers and other computers are underutilized and therefore cost much more that it really should. Further, since multiple images reside on the same piece of hardware, maintenance is much lower. Even further, disaster recovery becomes greatly simplified because a virtual image can be copied from one machine to another and be up and running within a matter of just a few minutes. Compare that with the last time your company had a server fail. It took a minimum of hours to restore and most likely was more than a day (depending on how the backup was designed).
VMWare invented the concept of virtualization and is the world’s leading expert in it. They have done it longer and better than anybody else and it is the reason we have invested our time and resources to train, use and implement VMware.