Cloud computing and Virtualization are two terms that have become an inevitable part of most business networks. While virtualization is not a new concept, the cloud computing revolution has brought this technology into limelight. Today, most of the US and UK markets has already embraced the innovation and Asia Pacific countries are not behind either. The usage of cloud computing technologies in the Asian Pacific region has increased by 42%, according to the 3rd annual report of VMWare on cloud computing trends in 2012.
In another report on Virtualization trends, Gartner Data Center reports that the main reason for the adoption of desktop virtualization environments is to reduce TCO and operational costs. The secondary reason was attributed to mobile desktop solutions. Looking at these reports, it is an inevitable fact that virtualization technology is going to stay for some time and companies need to embrace this technology at the earliest to stay ahead of the competition. Before choosing a virtualization product, it is important for businesses to understand the concept of virtualization, benefits offered by this innovative concept and major providers of this service.
What is virtualization?
Virtualization is a contemporary innovative concept of creating virtual computing resources to leverage infrastructure, improve business performance and optimize costs. It allows businesses to run multiple instances of operating systems, servers and data storage solutions on a single machine. Based on your business requirements, you can create virtualized hardware, software, storage and desktops. Large enterprises can benefit from server virtualization concepts while small and medium businesses can leverage resources with desktop virtualization solutions.
How does it work?
Virtualization networks consist of ‘Virtual Machines’ that contain separate operating system and applications. The ‘Hypervisor’, a small layer of software, manages these virtual machines. The hypervisor plays an important role of decoupling applications and allocating resources to each virtual machine. A Connection Broker is used to facilitate connections between resources. This connection broker creates sessions, manages and terminates sessions to decide how each resource is allocated to virtual appliances. Using a powerful connection broker, you can leverage server resources, run multiple applications on a single host and create a virtual desktop infrastructure.
Key benefits:
- Meet growing business demands with scalable IT solutions
- Run multiple instances of applications
- Quick and rapid deployment of applications
- High Uptimes and Disaster Recovery
- Enhanced security and reliable performance
- Mobility solutions
What does virtualization offer businesses?
Virtualization offers amazing benefits to businesses of all sizes. While reduced TCO is the primary benefit, the integration of business process and implementation of world-class technologies brings greater levels of agility and scalability to business processes. Creating and managing complex networks becomes easy and operational expenses are optimized.
Key providers
While there are several service providers, VMWare is leading the virtualization market. According to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant (June 2012), VMWare remained at the top while Microsoft and Citrix Systems followed it.
VMWare:
With a customer base of 250,000 and growing, VMWare is undoubtedly the leader in the virtualization segment. It offers the most trusted hypervisor that is reliable, secure and offers highly scalable solutions. Businesses get the flexibility to virtualize 100% of applications. Using VMWare, you can enforce security policies at the virtualization level. This innovative approach offers highly secured networks to your business. Moreover, organizations that have storage tiers can eliminate a manual misconfiguration while matching applications with corresponding storage tiers. VMWare’s hypervisors effectively move data to appropriate data centers. While agility is introduced, operational costs are reduced.
The only aspect that can stop you from choosing VMWare is the price. When compared with its competitors, VMWare is placed on a higher scale. However, organizations that build robust networks require higher levels of virtualization solutions and VMWare offers the highest value for your money. In addition, you need to check out compatible hardware listed on the company’s website to make sure that VMWare’s virtualization products suits your infrastructure.
Microsoft Hyper – V
Microsoft is another popular virtualization service provider that is trying to quickly catch up with VMWare. Hyper–V or Hyper-V R2 offers virtualizations solutions at an affordable price. Hyper-V creates a virtualization environment as an extension to the current infrastructure. On the other hand, VMWare isolates the virtualization environment within the infrastructure. Microsoft offers hypervisors with Windows 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012. Initialization times are minimal. With a familiar interface, managing the system is easy. In today’s shrinking budgets, Microsoft Hyper – V is a good choice to virtualize your infrastructure.
A notable drawback of Microsoft Hyper – V is its architectural issue. Each physical host carries windows as a parent OS. While patching the parent OS, all virtual machines need to be updated. Smaller organizations do not have an issue with this approach while large enterprises do.
Citrix XenDesktop
Citrix virtualization solutions are not behind either. Citrix offers free virtualization solutions that come with basic features. For additional features, customers have to upgrade to a higher version at a decent price. However, Citrix XenDesktop or XenApp do not offer extensive vendor support or partner support for critical aspects like automatic backups, disaster recovery and lifecycle management.
Virtualization solutions from VMWare, Microsoft or Citrix come with different architecture, features and pricing structure. Before choosing one product, you need to consider your virtualization requirements to make an informed decision.
