A large number of organizations have dedicated their physical servers to a certain application, making them (the servers) use minimal resources when running the application. However, this is a poor mechanism of server management because it leaves a lot of resources without being used, something that increases IT as well as operational costs.Â
Organizations need to understand that the applications that they use in their businesses contribute a lot to measuring the success of the business. In an effort to reduce these costs and save time, smart organizations have adopted application virtualization. Those that have not been able to adopt virtualization deliver applications to their users in ways that can affect their businesses negatively.
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What is Application Virtualization?
Application virtualization is the process of creating an abstraction layer over a physical server through the use of a software application. This allows organizations to create a computer system that is virtual, referred to as a virtual machine. This way, they can run different operating systems, applications, and virtual computers on the server – which, in essence, is partitioned into a number of virtual servers.Â
This process is very beneficial to organizations. One of the major benefits of application virtualization is allowing organizations to efficiently use the physical hardware of their computer systems, which ends up saving the organization a lot of time and money.
How Does Application Virtualization Save Time and Money?
Making Recovery Easy and Reducing Downtime
Just like any other electronic device, there are times when a physical server might break down, forcing IT departments to either fix or replace the server. This is a difficult process that might take a lot of time, leading to loss of business.
However, application virtualization makes the entire process easy. It allows organizations to clone or replicate the virtual server that has broken down through provisioning and deployment.Â
This takes a significantly short period of time, actually minutes, compared to replacing the physical server with a new one. In addition, it reduces the time that the organization’s applications will not be available for use, ensuring continuity of business operations.
Consolidates Applications onto a Virtualized Server
Organizations that have not employed application virtualization on their servers leave a lot of computing power idle. This power cannot be used by any other applications, making this quite inefficient.
However, adopting application virtualization allows organizations to create multiple virtual machines from their physical servers. They can even go ahead and install multiple operating systems on these virtual servers and have different applications running on each one of them. All this happens on a single physical server, which would otherwise have hosted a single application without virtualization.
Consolidating multiple applications on one server is a cost-reducing optimization mechanism the IT department can use since it helps them spend less on servers.
Server and Infrastructure Maintenance
Operating a single physical server with application virtualization allows organizations to run multiple applications on a single server. On the other hand, they would need multiple servers to run different applications if they did not adopt virtualization.
When it comes to maintaining virtualized servers, the IT personnel spend much less time compared to if they had multiple physical servers that would need to be worked on. This is because they can perform all their maintenance tasks on the virtualized server from a centralized place, compared to doing the same on different servers, a server at a time.Â
Reduces Power Consumption
Adopting application virtualization allows organizations to reduce the number of on-premise servers. For instance, an organization running five applications on five different servers can virtualize one of the servers and run all five applications from a single server.
In return, this leads to reduced power consumption, something that saves the organizations a lot of money. In addition, it reduces the emission of carbon, contributing to the conservation of the environment.
Conclusion
Application virtualization is important in helping organizations save on operational costs and time while at the same time increasing efficiency and scalability. Most organizations are continuously embracing it, and are leading in reaping the benefits discussed above.
