Benefits and risks of migrating physical servers into a virtual Essay

Benefits and risks of migrating physical servers into a virtual environment - Essay Example (VMware) The main advantages of server virtualization Server Virtualization technology provides a number of advantages that can be very useful to an IT department and to an organization as a whole. Following, we provide a list of representative IT issues that can take advantage of the benefits of Server Virtualization. Virtual machines can be utilized for consolidating the workload of multiple under-utilized servers into a smaller number of server machines, possibly to only one machine. The associated benefits of this are the economy in hardware infrastructure, environmental cost, in administration and maintenance costs. The need for executing old legacy applications that used to work in server machines with operating systems that have become outdated is absolutely fulfilled by the use of virtual servers. An old application might not be able to execute in a new environment that is running a new operating system. Even if it is possible to run in that server environment, it might under -utilize the server machine, in a way that the consolidation of this server together with others into a virtual server - as already mentioned in the previous paragraph- does make sense. This might not be feasible without the use of virtualization as this kind of applications usually have not been developed in a way that they can co-exist with others in an execution environment. Virtual severs can be used for the creation of operating systems or execution environments with limitations to the usage of physical resources, provided that there exist the suitable routers with guaranteed resource access. Virtual servers can be used for the execution of multiple operating systems simultaneously: different versions or even absolutely different operating systems. Virtual servers... It is evident from the study that Server Virtualization is a framework, methodology and technique that achieves the segmentation of the computer machine’s physical resources into multiple execution environments (which are called virtual private servers), by applying one or more technologies. It is the method of executing multiple independent virtual operating systems in a physical computer machine. It is a way of â€Å"disguising† the physical computer resources, including their number and the identity of the isolated physical servers, processors and operations systems, hiding them from the end users of the â€Å"virtual† server. Server Virtualization technology provides a number of advantages that can be very useful to an IT department and to an organization as a whole. Following, we provide a list of representative IT issues that can take advantage of the benefits of Server Virtualization. Virtual machines can be utilized for consolidating the workload of multi ple under-utilized servers into a smaller number of server machines, possibly to only one machine. The associated benefits of this are the economy in hardware infrastructure, environmental cost, in administration and maintenance costs. The migration of the physical servers of an organization to a virtual environment has a lot of benefits. However, server virtualization also generates a number of risks that the organizations have to take seriously into account. Those risks are analyzed in the paragraphs that follow.