Virtual Machines and Virtual Appliances

Benefits of VMware Virtualization

VMware virtualization made its debut in the late ’90s and early 2000’s, and virtualization is now very much a mainstream technology choice at most larger companies.  Due to the many benefits of VMware Virualization, today, it is used more often at small and mid-sized businesses.  With that growth has come a lot of new terms. In this post, we’ll talk about two important ones, Virtual Machines and Virtual Appliances.

A Virtual Machine (VM) is basically like having a whole computer and Operating System (OS) running inside another physical computer. Multiple VMs can be run on one physical computer.  Running multiple virtual machines on one physical server has many advantages.

  1. Cost Savings – Using virtualization cuts down on the number of physical computers you need to have.  This means you don’t spend as much money up front to buy hardware and you don’t spend as much on your electric bill later.  It also means you can fit more computing power into a given amount of square feet.
  2. Green – Using less electricity is better for the environment and better for your corporate image.
  3. Resiliency – Backup and recovery can be made much easier, making your IT environment more resilient.
  4. Ease of installation – Many software companies are delivering their products via pre-configured virtual appliance images, making installation a breeze.

 

So what’s a Virtual Appliance?

A Virtual Appliance (VA) is a pre-built, pre-configured software application, packaged with an operating system and delivered as a virtual image ready to run on a Virtual Machine.  Database servers, mail servers and security applications are all common examples.

If your company would like to take advantages of the many benefits of VMware virtualization, Nettology provides VMware consulting. We can also implement the architectural design, configuration, installation, and on-going support.  We provide both on-premise and cloud-hosted virtual servers.   We can implement a project from start to finish, or stand beside your staff providing advice and guidance during installation, and then be your team’s higher-level Tier 2 technical support afterwards. Contact us today.

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