In order to survive in the present-day highly competitive and fast-paced business world, companies have to be flexible and quick in adopting new technologies and strategies for further modernization. The globalized market has become largely reliant on IT landscape, which enables organizations to achieve a competitive benefit through agility, scalability, server consolidation, cost optimization, and innovation. The primary objective of any company is to minimize expenses using the available resources in the most efficient way possible. This and a lot of other goals can be obtained with the help of virtualization. (Chowdhury & Boutaba, 2010).
If defined in the most general terms, virtualization is an introduction of software abstraction layer (which is called virtual machine monitor or a hypervisor) in-between the physical platform and the operating system. It is now applied in testing, training, production, and other kinds of environments in order to extend independent virtual resources (Metzler, 2011).
Besides the demands advanced by the world of IT, virtualization is implemented with a view to economy as it helps reduce power consumption and air conditioning needs of a company. Moreover, it does not require additional space which is always associated with growth (Chowdhury & Boutaba, 2010).
If we sum up the major benefits that a company may receive through virtualization, they will run as follows:
- It helps save energy thereby supporting environment-friendliness. As it has already been mentioned, virtualization saves money spent on electricity and thus contributes to resolving ecological problems (Truong, 2010).
- It ensures consolidation, which means that fewer physical platforms are required to combine all the workloads. This leads to optimization of hardware, which becomes capable of supporting a number of various environments (Metzler, 2011).
- It makes server provisioning faster, which guarantees instantaneous capacity of business units on request (Metzler, 2011).
- It releases from the necessity to stick to one server vendor. Since virtualization abstracts from physical platforms, the company becomes more flexible in choosing equipment (Truong, 2010).
- It improves recovery from faults. A disaster recovery system is independent from hardware that can be easily replaced when failover is required (Truong, 2010).
- It increases uptime. The ability to switch from one server to another, which allows immediate recovery from system outages, also ensures continuity (Truong, 2010).
- It provides isolation of applications, which improves utilization of resources and thereby minimizes server waste (Metzler, 2011).
- It prolongs life of old applications. Virtualization allows encapsulating applications together with the environment that supports them (Metzler, 2011).
- It helps join the cloud. Virtualization provides you with storage of an infinite capacity (Truong, 2010).
However, even knowing all the advantages of virtualization, the management should also be aware of its risks and challenges in order to come to a reasonable solution concerning its implementation. The most common problem now is the security risk, which arises from fluctuating workloads, VM vulnerabilities, incompetent process management, wrong configuration settings, and a number of other factors. Besides, it is important to consider the overall maintenance cost of a virtualized environment, which includes hardware and software upgrades, licensing, VM support, etc. Although these problems cannot be called minor, they may still be resolved with the due approach (Metzler, 2011).
If an organization performing computing operations of multiple sites with a server count of more than 400 opts for virtualization, it is essential to determine the necessary size, capacity, and capabilities of the host system. With Hyper-V you should first and foremost develop a proper configuration (Velte & Velte, 2009). The implementation plan will be:
- to size your server for supporting virtualization (since, in this case, the server count amounts to 400, we deal with high system utilization and considerable traffic, which means that server requirements might not be sufficient for virtualization);
- to consider RAM (since we are concerned with a lot of guest sessions, we should make sure that the host system is configured with minimum 24GB of RAM);
- to identify processor requirements (in order to meet the performance demands, each session should have up to four cores);
- to provide disk storage for the server (there should be enough space to support both system files and guest sessions);
- to plan the budget (there must be enough for satisfying all the server needs) (Velte & Velte, 2009).
Since there exist several approaches to server virtualization, the most effective strategy to explain the basic concept to senior management would be to highlight the main benefits and drawbacks of each approach, for them to decide which one suits the organization’s needs best:
- full virtualization: provides the ability of entire simulation of physical hardware;
- para virtualization: provides simulation of most but not all the components of the physical platform;
- hardware-assisted virtualization: allows to set communication, with the hypervisor running in the root level;
- operating system virtualization: allows running several instances of OS in parallel (Metzler, 2011).
Taking into account the above-given plan and the specifics of the organization, it seems reasonable to opt for para virtualization. This type of infrastructure is cheaper and much easier to introduce than full virtualization. It is accounted for by the fact that the host OS switches to a suspension mode as soon as it launches VM emulator, whereas the guest OS continues running in an active state. It will ensure high performance for the network in cases when hardware assistance is no longer available.
References
Chowdhury, N. M. K., & Boutaba, R. (2010). A survey of network virtualization. Computer Networks, 54(5), 862-876.
Metzler, J. (2011). Virtualization: Benefits, challenges, and solutions. Riverbed Technology, San Francisco.
Truong, D. (2010). How cloud computing enhances competitive advantages: A research model for small businesses. The Business Review, Cambridge, 15(1), 59-65.
Velte, A., & Velte, T. (2009). Microsoft virtualization with Hyper-V. McGraw-Hill, Inc..