Virtualization Overview

Virtualization has proven to be a successful strategy for large corporations in the last year. What we have learned from these large scale projects is now being used to assist medium sized enterprises. This is the first in a series of Virtualization articles exploring the opportunities available to our customers.

Introduction
Among the leading business challenges confronting CIOs and IT managers today are: cost-effective utilization of IT infrastructure; responsiveness in supporting new business initiatives; and flexibility in adapting to organizational changes. Driving an additional sense of urgency is the continued climate of IT budget constraints and more stringent regulatory requirements. Virtualization is a fundamental technological innovation that allows skilled IT managers to deploy creative solutions to such business challenges.

Virtualization in a Nutshell
Simply put, virtualization is an idea whose time has come. The term virtualization broadly describes the separation of a resource or request for a service from the underlying physical delivery of that service. With virtual memory, for example, computer software gains access to more memory than is physically installed, via the background swapping of data to disk storage. Similarly, virtualization techniques can be applied to other IT infrastructure layers – including networks, storage, laptop or server hardware, operating systems and applications. This blend of virtualization technologies – or virtual infrastructure – provides a layer of abstraction between computing, storage and networking hardware, and the applications running on it . The deployment of virtual infrastructure is non-disruptive, since the user experiences are largely unchanged. However, virtual infrastructure gives administrators the advantage of managing pooled resources across the enterprise, allowing IT managers to be more responsive to dynamic organizational needs and to better leverage infrastructure investments.

Using virtual infrastructure solutions, enterprise IT managers can address challenges that include:

• Server Consolidation and Containment – Eliminating ‘server sprawl’ via deployment of systems as virtual machines (VMs) that can run safely and move transparently across shared hardware, and increase server utilization rates from 5-15% to 60-80%.

• Test and Development Optimization – Rapidly provisioning test and development servers by reusing pre-configured systems, enhancing developer collaboration and standardizing development environments.

• Business Continuity – Reducing the cost and complexity of business continuity (high availability and disaster recovery solutions) by encapsulating entire systems into single files that can be replicated and restored on any target server, thus minimizing downtime.

• Enterprise Desktop – Securing unmanaged PCs, workstations and laptops without compromising end user autonomy by layering a security policy in software around desktop virtual machines.