Originally published by Compare the Cloud
The cloud computing landscape is a complex ecosystem characterised by constant innovation and the pursuit of optimal efficiency. Hypervisors have emerged as critical components of this ecosystem, and their role in cloud computing is more important than ever. This increased importance is due to the growing complexity of the cloud and recent structural changes in the industry, including Broadcom’s high-profile acquisition of VMware—a leader in virtualisation — and the emergence of new vendors offering innovative virtualisation solutions.
Understanding hypervisors, their capabilities, and their benefits can unlock new opportunities for your business’s growth and success. Let’s explore what hypervisors are, why they matter, and how they’re transforming modern industries, from financial services to healthcare.
The evolution of server management
In the early days of computing, physical servers were monolithic entities, each dedicated to running a specific operating system and application. This rigid architecture led to significant inefficiencies. Servers often sat idle, underutilised, or were overprovisioned to handle peak loads, resulting in wasted resources and increased costs. Managing these physical servers was a complex and time-consuming task, requiring dedicated hardware, power, cooling, and physical space. The advent of hypervisors has transformed this landscape.
A hypervisor is essentially a software layer that creates and manages virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server. These VMs are isolated environments, each with its own operating system and applications as if they were running on dedicated hardware. This virtualisation technology, enabled by hypervisors, has transformed server management by allowing multiple workloads to coexist on a single physical server, significantly improving processes like resource utilisation, management, and disaster recovery.
The power of virtualisation
Virtualisation creates a flexible and efficient environment where resources can be dynamically allocated and managed, offering a number of benefits for your business such as:
- Improved resource efficiency: By consolidating multiple workloads onto a single physical server, hypervisors maximise hardware utilisation and reduce costs associated with underutilised resources. This means your business can make the most of its existing infrastructure while minimising unnecessary expenses.
- Enhanced scalability: Hypervisors provide the ability to dynamically allocate resources, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency. In other words, you can easily scale your IT infrastructure up or down to meet fluctuating demands. For example, a retail company can use hypervisors to dynamically scale its e-commerce platform to handle peak demand during holiday seasons, ensuring a seamless customer experience without overprovisioning resources.
- Simplified management: Hypervisors offer a centralised platform for managing multiple virtual machines, reducing administrative overhead and accelerating service delivery. As a result, IT operations are streamlined, and your teams can focus on other business initiatives.
- Disaster recovery and business continuity: Hypervisors help with building resiliency against disruptions by enabling the creation of virtual backups and disaster recovery plans. Consequently, critical data can be protected, and operations can be quickly restored in the event of hardware failure or other unforeseen incidents. For instance, if you’re a manufacturing company, you can use hypervisors to create virtual backups of your production systems, ensuring that you can quickly restore operations in the event of a hardware failure.
- Accelerated time-to-market: Finally, hypervisors allow for rapid deployment of virtual machines, enabling organisations to quickly provision new applications and services. This reduces time-to-market and helps businesses gain a competitive edge. For example, a software development company can use hypervisors to quickly test and deploy new software updates, accelerating product release and increasing customer satisfaction.
Real-world impact
Hypervisors have proven to be invaluable in many industries. As mentioned above, they are an essential tool for any modern e-commerce business, enabling the platform to dynamically scale to meet peaks in demand during busy periods such as the festive season, ensuring a seamless customer experience. The same can be said for any organisation likely to experience sudden surges in online traffic.
Take Hyve Managed Hosting‘s partnership with the National Television Awards here in the UK as an example. During the awards’ online voting period, we were able to increase server resources by 24 times without adding any physical hardware, ensuring a smooth voting experience even during peak traffic. This dynamic scalability, enabled by hypervisors, allowed us to meet fluctuating demands while optimising costs.
Elsewhere, in healthcare, hypervisors are used to create virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), providing remote access to patient records and applications for doctors and staff, while in financial services, hypervisors help institutions consolidate their IT infrastructure, reducing costs and improving disaster recovery capabilities.
Staying ahead with hypervisors
As cloud computing technologies continue to evolve and the industry faces frequent shifts due to market changes, it is vital to keep abreast of the latest trends and developments. This knowledge not only helps your organisation navigate the industry’s volatility but also enables you to make informed decisions about your IT infrastructure and gain a competitive edge in the increasingly digital market.
Hypervisors are essential tools that enable you to optimise your IT infrastructure, improve efficiency and increase scalability. By understanding the capabilities, benefits and recent advancements of this technology, you can identify new opportunities for growth and innovation in your organisation’s digital transformation efforts.
