Economic Aspects of Virtualization

The term "virtualization" has recently become very popular. Virtual solutions are applied to varying degrees in the vast majority of information systems. Specialists use them for testing purposes, to place additional tasks on existing equipment, for training, etc. Virtualize servers, workstations, storage systems, network infrastructure.

Economic aspects of virtualization

Before embarking on the implementation of virtual systems, you should carefully think over what we want to get as a result and how much it will cost. Despite the fact that practically in every presentation we hear about the economic efficiency of the technology, in practice the introduction of virtualization is accompanied by costs, and quite impressive.

First, virtualization requires an IT infrastructure, for example, a data storage system connected to multiple servers.

Secondly, software that allows you to take advantage of virtual environments: migrating virtual machines from one physical server to another in real time, balancing the load on physical servers, turning off unused equipment, etc., is a commercial and relatively expensive product. As a result, the economic effect of the transition to virtual environments is achieved, starting with a certain number of servers. If you do not need to install 10 new servers at once, then you will have to buy new hardware immediately and in consideration of all future systems.

The effectiveness of managing a complex of virtual machines under our conditions can rarely be estimated in figures, since there are no regular changes among IT specialists (for example, reducing the number of system administrators or attracting IT outsourcing) after the introduction of virtualization solutions, and the costs for powering server enterprises are usually not Are taken into account on a separate line.

As a result, the introduction of virtualization often leads only to additional costs for maintaining the IT infrastructure and administering servers

Developers of virtual solutions

There are several virtualization technologies developed by different vendors. Here is just a short list of the most actively used virtualization solutions. The leader of the virtualization market today are VMware products. VMware solutions virtualize virtually the entire line of operating systems (Windows, Linux, Apple Macintosh, etc.), the company's software is tightly integrated with the hardware capabilities of many platforms, fault-tolerant solutions technologies are implemented, etc. The software line is presented as freely distributed ( Hypervisor ESXi), and commercial products.

XEN is an open source hypervisor that has become the forerunner of many open solutions.

Based on this hypervisor, Citrix has created XenServer servers , which are also free solutions. True, the software for centralized management of XenServer servers is a commercial product.

Sun (now Oracle) has released VirtualBox virtual machine. This solution is free of charge and can be downloaded from the Oracle website. Oracle also has a solution for VDI, Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) , and up to 10 virtual desktops can be tested for free for an unlimited time.

As part of the server operating systems Windows 2008 there is a hypervisor - HyperV, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft site and as a separate product and can be used completely free of charge. Open source products have recently been actively using the virtualization solution with the name KVM (for example, this hypervisor is included in Ubuntu, RedHat, etc.). The KVM hypervisor implements virtualization on Linux systems and is available both in the respective distributions and through the installation packages.