A virtualized data center is best suited for organizations that need flexibility, scalability, and efficiency in their IT infrastructure. There are several key scenarios where implementing a virtualized data center makes sense:
Supporting Development and Testing Environments
Virtualization allows IT teams to quickly spin up and tear down development and testing environments on demand. Instead of procuring physical servers that sit idle most of the time, virtual resources can be deployed only when needed. This improves efficiency and reduces costs associated with maintaining unused hardware.
With a virtualized data center, developers can easily create replicas of the production environment for testing applications before deployment. The ability to replicate systems quickly with minimal effort makes the development lifecycle more agile.
Enabling Infrastructure Elasticity
In a traditional physical data center, expanding infrastructure capacity requires purchasing, installing, and configuring new servers – a lengthy process that takes weeks or months. With a virtualized environment, new resources can be spun up in minutes without procuring new hardware.
This level of flexibility is essential for organizations with variable or unpredictable resource demands. For example, an e-commerce site may need to scale out its web servers temporarily on Black Friday to handle a spike in traffic. Similarly, a marketing campaign could generate higher than normal loads on databases used for analytics. A virtualized data center allows infrastructure to quickly scale up or down to meet changing resource requirements.
Supporting Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
A key advantage of virtualization is the ability to abstract workloads from the underlying physical hardware. In the event of a server failure, virtual machines can be migrated to other hosts without interruption. This facilitates high availability and simplifies disaster recovery.
With key systems virtualized, entire data centers can be replicated to remote facilities for disaster recovery purposes. If the primary site goes down due to failure or natural disaster, applications and services can be restored rapidly by shifting operations to the secondary location.
Optimizing Hardware Utilization
Virtualization enables more efficient utilization of computing resources. By breaking down silos and pooling resources across multiple servers, organizations can achieve higher server density and resource utilization compared to traditional non-virtualized environments.
With physical servers, resources tend to be stranded. There are limits to how much you can safely run on a single server, so many end up sitting nearly idle. With virtualization, spare capacity is shared across all hosts in the cluster allowing for higher consolidation ratios. Improved utilization reduces data center hardware costs and energy consumption.
Facilitating Migration to Cloud Computing
Transitioning legacy applications and infrastructure to the cloud can be challenging. Virtualization provides an intermediary step, allowing organizations to migrate systems progressively while maintaining compatibility with existing interfaces and dependencies.
Key backend systems like databases can be decoupled and moved to cloud platforms while keeping interconnectivity intact. Front end components can remain on-premises. This hybrid model allows organizations to dip their toes in the cloud while minimizing disruption to systems and users.
Enabling Infrastructure Automation
Virtualized environments readily lend themselves to automation. Machine images can be configured once and then deployed repeatedly to create consistent, standardized systems. Orchestration and configuration management tools can automate setup, scaling, andtear down of resources as needed.
Automation reduces the maintenance overhead associated with deploying and managing physical servers. It also improves agility by enabling IT to respond dynamically to changing requirements through programmatic control of infrastructure.
Facilitating Desktop Virtualization and BYOD
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) leverages server virtualization to deliver desktop environments that can be accessed remotely from a wide range of client devices. This approach facilitates bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives since client systems simply need a way to connect to the virtualized desktop.
VDI provides a consistent, centralized means of managing user computing environments regardless of endpoint location or device. It enhances security since data resides in the data center rather than on local devices which are prone to loss or theft when outside the office.
Enabling Cross-Platform Support
Virtualization creates an abstraction layer that decouples system stacks from the constraints of physical hardware. Virtual machines can readily emulate hardware configurations required to run various operating systems and applications.
This facilitates cross-platform support, allowing organizations to run Linux, Windows, and specialty OSes side-by-side on the same hardware. Legacy and niche applications can be virtualized and consolidated rather than having to maintain separate siloed servers for each platform.
Centralizing Management and Improving Visibility
In traditional data centers, infrastructure and configuration management tends to be decentralized and heterogeneous. With virtualization, all resources can be aggregated into a centralized pool that provides a “single pane of glass” view of the IT environment.
Consolidated control and visibility enables improved governance. Organizations can standardize configurations, track resource utilization, maintain consistent security policies, and optimize infrastructure performance holistically rather than at an individual server level.
Enabling Software-Defined Data Centers
When server virtualization is combined with software-defined storage, networking, and management, it facilitates the creation of a fully software-defined data center. All elements of the infrastructure are virtualized and delivered programmatically without dependence on proprietary hardware.
Software-defined data centers provide ultimate levels of abstraction and automation. The data center can be treated as “code” that can be programmed and managed through a unified API. This paves the way for true infrastructure as code capabilities.
Facilitating Multitenancy and Consolidation
The isolation provided by virtual machines enables securely consolidating multiple tenants on shared infrastructure. Resources can be dynamically allocated between tenant domains on demand.
Multitenancy improves efficiency and cost effectiveness for service providers and enterprises running internal private clouds. The ability to serve multiple clients from a common pool of resources makes virtualized infrastructure attractive for managed hosting providers and SaaS companies.
Enabling New Architectures and Paradigms
Virtualization provides the foundation for many next-generation architectures and paradigms that are difficult to achieve using solely physical infrastructure:
- Hybrid cloud – As discussed earlier, virtualization facilitates migration of workloads between on-prem and public cloud environments.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – IaaS cloud offerings are underpinned by virtualization technology that carves up pooled resources into customer VMs and storage.
- Microservices – Virtual machines can provide isolation for granular microservices-based applications.
- Containers – Containers build on lightweight VM capabilities to provide operating system level abstraction.
- Serverless computing – Virtualization enables the on-demand event-driven invocation model behind serverless platforms.
These emerging paradigms unlock innovation by providing cloud-like flexibility even within on-prem environments. Virtualization capabilities make the data center software-defined and programmable.
Conclusion
Virtualized data centers provide flexibility, efficiency, and agility across a wide range of use cases from development and testing to cloud migration and service delivery. By pooling resources and introducing abstraction, virtual infrastructure unlocks capabilities that are difficult and costly to achieve using dedicated physical servers.
Any organization looking to improve IT responsiveness, optimize infrastructure utilization, or streamline system management would benefit from evaluating virtualized data center options. The ability to deploy servers programmatically and manage them centrally is a game changer versus traditional infrastructure silos.
With its many advantages, it is no surprise that virtualization has gone mainstream. According to Gartner, over 75% of x86 workloads were virtualized as of 2018. The shift toward virtual infrastructure will only accelerate as organizations continue moving away from legacy physical data centers and toward more agile, cloud-like deployment models.
References
- Rouse, Margaret. “Definition: Virtualization.” TechTarget, www.techtarget.com/searchenterprisedesktop/definition/virtualization.
- IBM Cloud Education. “Virtualization.” IBM, www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/virtualization.
- Rouse, Margaret. “Virtualized Data Center.” TechTarget, www.searchvmware.techtarget.com/definition/virtualized-data-center.
- Dass, Puneet. “Top 11 Benefits of Virtualization in the Data Center.” VMware Blogs, blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/02/top-11-benefits-of-virtualization-in-the-data-center.html.
- Brandon, John. “The Benefits of Server Virtualization.” TechGenix, www.techgenix.com/server-virtualization/benefits/.