For modern businesses, running an efficient, agile, and sustainable IT infrastructure is critical to optimise operations, adapt swiftly to evolving demands, reduce their environmental impact, and remain competitive in a digital landscape that is continuously evolving. Failing to fully utilise the capabilities of your company’s IT infrastructure can inhibit your organisation’s potential and ambitions by hindering its ability to scale, innovate and adapt to change.
Virtualisation has emerged as a powerful technology that enables organisations to achieve their goals through improved resource optimisation, simplified management, and enhanced scalability.
So, what is virtualisation and what are its benefits?
What Is A Virtualisation Server?
A virtualization server is physical server hardware on which hypervisor software is installed to create and run virtual machines (VMs). By sharing common underlying resources, such as CPU, memory, and storage, it allows multiple virtual machines to run independently. This provides greater efficiency and utilisation compared to running workloads on dedicated single-purpose servers. Virtualization allows businesses to reduce hardware costs, increase flexibility, and optimise infrastructure management.
There are numerous benefits of visualisation, including…
1. Optimisation Of Resources
By allowing multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical server, virtualisation maximises the utilisation of hardware and reduces the physical footprint required to deliver capacity. Workloads can be consolidated from hundreds of underutilised discrete servers onto a smaller number of hosts running virtual machines. This drives significant cost savings, both from reduced capital expenditure on new servers, as well as lower operating costs for space, cooling, and electricity.
2. Unlimited Expansion Potential
With virtualisation, new servers can be provisioned rapidly as virtual machines rather than physical deployments, creating an agile infrastructure that can seamlessly scale up to meet changing demands. The division between virtual machines and underlying hardware means that expanding capacity no longer requires the purchase and installation of new equipment, thereby eliminating the physical limitations on growth and the costs involved in installing infrastructure.
3. Simplified Management
Virtualisation streamlines IT management processes through centralised controls, automation, and orchestration. Rather than individually configuring and updating separate servers, system administrators can manage pools of virtualised resources from a single unified dashboard. This reduces the administrative overheads and complexities involved with large-scale server deployments.
4. Improved Disaster Recovery
Every business should have a disaster recovery plan to protect its digital assets. Virtualisation platforms facilitate quicker disaster recovery processes through snapshot, backup, and replication capabilities. Full system backups and snapshots can be scheduled frequently with minimal impact on operations, while entire virtual machines can also be replicated to remote sites for high availability and fast restoration in the event of system failures or critical incidents.
5. Extended Life Cycles
Legacy applications running on older hardware can also be encapsulated within virtual machines, extending the useful life of existing infrastructure investments and providing greater cost-efficiency and seamless integration with modern systems.
Unlock The Potential Of Your IT Infrastructure
If you feel that you’re not getting the most from your IT infrastructure, speak to the experts at Nexstor today to find out how our virtualisation solutions could transform your business.
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