Virtualization: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Recommendations

This article discusses the reasons for virtualization, what can be virtualized, major companies providing virtualization services, advantages and disadvantages of virtualization, and recommendations for implementing it in an organization.

2018
Virtualization
The topic of study is virtualization
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Table of Contents
Introduction...............................................................................................................................................1
Discussion...................................................................................................................................................1
Why?.......................................................................................................................................................1
What?.....................................................................................................................................................1
Who? Where? And When?...................................................................................................................1
Advantages of Virtualization....................................................................................................................2
Disadvantages of Virtualization...............................................................................................................2
Recommendations.....................................................................................................................................3
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................3
References List............................................................................................................................................3
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Introduction
Notably, in today’s era, many leading businesses have challenges which confront the IT
managers and the CIOs such as making the cost to be effective when utilizing the IT
infrastructures, responding into new initiatives in the business among many more. Virtualization
has been noted to be a major fundamental of the technological innovation that has allowed the IT
managers who are skilled in deploying the creative solutions to such described challenges in the
business. Virtualization is one of the major parts of the cloud computing especially when we
consider the platform of IaaS. Virtualization can be defined as creating a virtual machine that
will be used in virtualizing all the resources such as the hardware: Memory, Storage and the
connectivity in the network (Goldberg, 2014).
Discussion
Why?
The reasons for virtualization is to avoid the physical servers and migrate to cloud-based servers.
Some of the factors that have driven the above benefit are such as the mobility, the cost,
efficiency and the availability of such services. There are some major reasons to as why we
virtualize such as the: There is less overhead, easy to deploy and redeploy faster, one can quick
and easily backup all data and improving the test environment (Agile, 2013).
What?
Virtualization is a very wide topic and in the IT infrastructure, there are areas on what to
virtualize (Rixner., 2008). Some of what we can virtualize are such as the:
i. The virtualization of the CPU
ii. The virtualization of the Memory
iii. The virtualization of The Network
Who? Where? And When?
Internationally there are companies that provide virtualization. Some of the major companies
being Oracle, Microsoft, Red Hat, Amazon, Google, Odin, Huawei and Verde VDI. Before we
virtualize we have to ask ourselves so many questions such as the available components, is this
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the right time to virtualize, the urgency of the process, safety and how cost effective it is when
compared with the normal physical servers.
Advantages of Virtualization.
1. It is cheaper when compared to maintaining the physical servers.
2. The costs for virtualization are predictable
3. It has been known to reduce the workload
4. The uptime offered by Virtualization is better compared to that of physical hardware’s.
5. Deployment of resources in virtualization is very fast (Hanchinal, 2014).
6. Virtualization has been known for promoting the digital entrepreneurship
7. It offers provisions for energy savings.
8. The operating system is independent
9. Easy to migrate data
10. The hardware is independent.
Disadvantages of Virtualization
1. Sometimes it can be of high cost when implementing
2. Just like any other application, it has some limitations
3. It has led to the creation of risks in the security.
4. The issue of availability has also been a problem’
5. Another issue is that of scalability
6. It may take time from the initial stage to implementation.
7. Sometimes there are cases of hardware incompatibility
8. The performance may be unstable
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Recommendations
Virtualization is a fast growing technology and if all the steps followed well then it will be easy
as to migrate from one technology to the other. If we understand what, where, why and when to
virtualize then we will have a smooth transition from physical to cloud-based servers. It will be
advisable for any organization to know what they will gain when they virtualize and how they
will solve their internal problems in all ways. This will help them in understanding the type of
platform they are required to apply.
Conclusion
As seen from above we can see that virtualization is rapid growing technology that has many
pros as well as cons and hence putting us in a situation where we need to be careful when
applying it our companies. Virtualization can be done in network, memory, CPU and many other
hardware resources such as Servers. Microsoft, VMware and Oracle are the major companies
known for offering Virtualization services. In conclusion, it will be wise to say that virtualization
is better when compared to physical hardware storage.
References List
Agile. (2013, January 13). Why Virtualize? Retrieved from AgileIT:
https://www.agileit.com/news/why-virtualize/
Goldberg, G. J. (2014, July). Commun ACM. Formal requirements for virtualizable third
generation architectures., 17(7), 412–421.
Hanchinal, P. (2014, April 23). Virtualization-the Cloud Enabler by INSPIRE-groups
(VTU,2014). Retrieved from Pros and Cons of Virtualization:
https://www.slideshare.net/PraveenHanchinal/virtualizationthe-cloud-enabler-by-
inspiregroups/29-Pros_and_Cons_of_VirtualizationProsSandboxHardware
Rixner., S. (2008). Breaking the performance barrier. Network virtualization:, 6(1), 37.
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