Physical servers are very costly machines in terms of purchase, setup, and maintenance. When they fail, it can be costly for a company’s business continuity. Fortunately, a business of any size can save thousands of dollars by virtualizing their servers. The following will give an overview regarding virtualization, virtual machines and how they can benefit your business.

Virtual Machine (VMs)

Functioning as either a virtual computer or virtual server, a cloud-hosted VM can utilize scalable on-demand resources at a lower expense than buying a physical machine.
Since each is capable of hosting several virtual servers, the ability to set up VMs quickly provides incentives for a newer company to invest more in their initial IT outlay, obtaining greater value from its investment and promoting growth from the outset.

Basic Glossary

Virtualization: Technology allowing the creation of software-based virtual machines capable of running several operating systems from one physical machine.
Hypervisor: Software which enables the management of virtual machines, giving them the ability to directly interact with underlying hardware.
P2V (Physical to Virtual): The migration of applications, data, and operating systems from a physical server’s hard disk to a virtual machine.
VM Snapshot: Captures a VM’s state and data at a specific point in time, which allows for its recovery at that point in time. However, a snapshot is not a backup method. Snapshots are utilized by backup software to perform a backup properly.
Clone: This is an identical copy of a VM, which can be transferred to another virtual machine.

Host & Guest

It is important to keep in mind a virtual machine is a guest of a host machine. Usually a high-powered server, the host machine is commonly used for hosting computing resources. In contrast, a VM, either a virtualized server or a virtualized computer, is a guest in the host machine. The ability to accommodate several guest machines on one host machine can save cut significant costs.
Part 2 will discuss the uses and benefits of VMs.
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