Developer: Choosing the right virtualization technology

BANGALORE, INDIA: Virtualization is one of the biggest buzzwords in the technology industry today, and the one that has proven to generate tangible benefits for organizations. The adoption of virtualization, has managed to garner a lot of momentum of late. But it has been observed that it has essentially been adopted by the larger organizations rather than mid-sized companies.

Unfortunately a lot of these mid-sized organizations lack awareness about the benefits of implementation and proper usage of virtualization in the truest sense. The preparation for adopting virtualization requires good knowledge about its utilization, benefits and the further steps to take forward.

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Before adopting virtualization, a mid-sized company needs to prioritize the importance of IT and allocate proper investments in the technological side of a business. By undergoing a proof of concept, a company can know about the actual capacities of their servers and also understand the positive impact of such a technical transition.

Key benefits of virtualization

Efficiency and cost reduction - Virtualization technologies increase the utilization of servers and storage in order to run the IT infrastructure more efficiently and at a lower cost.

Simplification of management and maintenance- Virtualization allows organizations to reduce (planned) downtime by relocating workloads before systems undergo planned maintenance or upgrades. The speed of provisioning is increased by migrating virtual servers and desktops between physical platforms without impacting users.

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Improved availability and disaster recovery- Through the use of virtualization, organizations can have fewer systems at the DR site to run virtual workloads and recovery can be done on dissimilar hardware, both of which significantly reduce the cost of the DR site.

Choosing the 'right' virtualization technology

It is very important to check the feasibility and ascertain the output before choosing any technology. The three prime aspects which need to be kept in mind before adopting any technology can be categorized as follows:

Efficiency: It is one of the major criteria for which mid-sized and even larger organizations go in for virtualization. Technology which can bring forth cost savings, better consolidation ratios, lesser administration costs and optimized management can be opted for.

Control: Quality of service is important. IT solution used should deliver on SLAs and put a cap on costs.

Choice: There should be enough choices for an organization, of any size, to adopt. Flexibility in terms of software stack, OS, hardware as well as service providers are some of the points which capture an organization's attention.