Virtualization is used more and more, whether by professionals or individuals.
Indeed, virtualization saves money, but also energy. Which is a double win.
- Virtualization advantages
- Virtualize operating systems (OS) to save money
- Consolidate your servers to save money
1. Virtualization advantages
Virtualization allows you to:
- consolidate your servers: in business, professionals use more powerful servers to host different services via different virtual machines.
- be more cost-effective: again, as all your services run on the same server instead of several physical servers, this allows you to save energy and therefore money.
- benefit from security: each virtual machine is isolated from the physical system and therefore has its own operating system, its own applications, etc.
- benefit from fault tolerance: depending on the virtualization solution used, you can create snapshots of your virtual machines to restore them to the previous state if necessary.
Even benefit from high availability with the VMware vSphere virtualization solution. - carry out tests: virtualization allows you to test new operating systems (Windows, Linux, ...) or to test different applications or operations in a virtual machine without this impacting your physical computer.
Which saves you from purchasing one or more additional computers just for your tests. - and more
2. Virtualize operating systems (OS) to save money
If you are a geek or simply want to test new operating systems and the compatibility of your applications with them, virtualization can allow you to do this for free (or cheaper).
Indeed, rather than buying a PC (desktop, laptop or even mini) solely for these tests, you can simply virtualize these new OS on your current physical PC thanks to virtualization solutions installable on Windows, Linux, ... :
- for Windows and Linux, you will find in particular VMware Workstation Pro (which is very complete) or VMware Workstation Player (the free version for personal use).
- for Windows, Linux, ..., you will also find the VirtualBox equivalent which is free and intended for individuals. Unlike VMware solutions which are more complete, because they are preferred by professionals.
3. Consolidate your servers to save money
As explained previously, consolidating a server means that a company's different services are hosted on different virtual machines rather than on different physical servers.
This allows you to allocate only the resources it needs (based on the prerequisites given by the manufacturer) and to later adapt these resources if necessary.
Consolidating a server therefore makes it possible to use the resources of a physical server as much as possible and avoid buying too many servers which would run at only 20% of their capacity.
Server consolidation therefore allows you to save money by purchasing fewer servers and avoiding running an energy-hungry server when the service hosted on it is not even using half of its capacity.
To consolidate a server, you can use:
- the VMware ESXi hypervisor which is free and for which you can also obtain support in the case of a business by purchasing the VMware vSphere solution.
- the VMware vSphere solution available in several editions (Standard and Enterprise Plus) and several packs (Essentials Kit and Essentials Plus Kit).
Depending on the edition or pack chosen, you will be able to use VMware vCenter Server to centrally manage your VMware ESXi hypervisors.
To learn more about the solutions, visit the VMware website.
At Citrix, you will also find the equivalent "Citrix Hypervisor".
