Using Virtualization
Let’s face it. Rarely do you get a blank check when it comes to your IT budget. Yet data is growing at an alarming rate, and more applications and services are being added than removed. At the same time, you are expected to keep doing what you have been doing with a constantly shrinking budget, or you are asked to do more with the same or fewer resources. Today’s challenging economy is only compounding the issue and making it nearly impossible for you to meet business needs without exceeding IT resources.
The Solution – Virtualization.
Virtual machines allow the sharing of the physical machines resources between different virtual machines, each running its own operating system. The software layer or host providing the virtualization is called a hypervisor. A hypervisor can run on bare hardware or on top of an operating system. Simply put, server virtualization software allows you to run multiple guest computers on a single host computer with the guest computers believing they are running on their own hardware. By doing this, you gain all the benefits of any type of virtualization: portability of guest virtual machines, reduced operating costs, reduced administrative overhead, server consolidation, testing & training, disaster recovery benefits.
Examples of server virtualization products are:
- VMware Server, Workstation, Player, and ESX Server
- Microsoft Virtual PC
- Virtualbox
Virtualization could save you money, time and your data in case of disaster. It also helps reduce the costs of power and cooling, improve the use of servers, do more with less hardware.


This post has 4 comments
November 4th, 2009
Hi,
Thanks for the insight gives a good idea for those of us who want to venture into this. Also maybe in future you can do a review of each of the VS you listed pro’s and con’s if any.
Could you do a step-by-step tutorial perhaps of how to install say VMware on a pc running windows 7/vista/XP.
Thanks for the great work keep it up
Hilum
November 4th, 2009
Asante Hilum for the support. Yes I could do a review of the most use VM software’s, more specifically the ones I have listed here. I could also do the step by step tutorial.
Once again thank you for the support.
Please spread the word
November 4th, 2009
I did have some problems with starting my VMware image on the old windows installation. So before you trust the images, you need to do a test. But that is also much easier when you are not reinstalling your systems.
November 4th, 2009
Well you could use VMware converter to convert your live system into an a VMware image, then use VMware player to test the image.
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