Understand Virtualisation

What is Virtualisation?

Virtualisation allows a single computer to perform the same function as multiple computers and enables people to share a number of computers’ resources easily. Essentially it consolidates a number of servers allowing one computer to do the job of multiple computers on a single platform.

To draw a simple analogy, it is rather like four people that drive to work in individual cars despite living next door to each other and working in the same office. The reality is that it’s wasteful, uneconomic and a pointless use of resources.

So in summary, virtualisation is better described as a range of technologies that consolidates computer resource and should not to be associated with the term ‘beam me up Scotty’.  Leading the Virtualisation field is VMware but if anyone remembers Smiths Crisps, then VMware have a similar market share to the once Crisp giant and there are a few 'Gary Linekers' of Walkers crisp fame on the horizon in Microsoft, Citrix  and Parallells, three vendors with very compelling and competitive virtualisation offerings. Other vendors aligned to this segment include Thin Computing vendors such as Wyse who offer desktop virtualisation as do Ericom. Storage virtualisation is a growth area with vendors such as Virsto Software and would you know it, Mitel are joining the bandwagon by providing voice virtualisation in partnership with – you guessed it, Smiths Crisps, I mean VMware.  

The Future of Virtualisation

Virtualisation has been around since the 1960s when mainframes were the most common way of processing data. In the 1960s the idea came about that it would be useful to share the processing power of a number of mainframes or large computers in order to share their combined computing power. This meant that costs could be reduced as mainframes could cost multiples of millions of pounds. Furthermore, these computers needed special environments to be able to work properly as well as large amounts of space because the machines were so large.

Since that period, virtualisation has become more sophisticated and the market for this type of technology is rapidly growing. As a result, this is an area of IT that is set to expand and increase over the coming years. There are now a number of virtualisation products that are able meet the needs of not only large corporations where it was originally of major benefit, but smaller companies as well, as they can reduce their costs by operating in a ‘virtual environment’.

Why Virtualisation?

A major reason for an organisation to use a virtualisation system is to save costs by reducing the need to purchase more hardware and to reduce energy consumption.

In addition users are able to manage a number of systems more easily, especially if they are based at multiple locations. This is because these systems regardless of where they are based will appear to be in one place. This helps to maximise the computing resources that an organisation already has in place.