Virtualization software from

Here's what we'll cover: What is virtualization software? Common features of virtualization software What type of buyer are you? Benefits of virtualization software Key considerations What is virtualization software? A view of the virtual machine manager in Virtual Box Source Common features of virtualization software These are the common features most buyers seek when purchasing virtualization software: Configuration Management Maintain your system by preventing unapproved changes from altering your virtual machine and the host machine.

Identify the components of the system servers, configuration, or software with problem configurations and reconfigure them to your desired state. Data Migration Move data from a virtual machine without suffering data loss or service lags. Upgrade to a higher version of the software even when working in a virtual environment with next to no downtime.

Virtual Machine Monitoring Create and manage multiple virtual environments on one physical machine and deploy different operating systems and applications. Also called a hypervisor, virtual machine monitoring creates a thin software layer between the host operating system and virtual environments. Control who can administer, run, suspend, or stop the virtual environments. Backup and Recovery Create backups of your virtual machine within the system or remotely to save all of your data and the entire configuration, and resume productivity even if the system breaks down or requires an upgrade.

Performance Monitoring Monitor the performance of virtual machines and track the oversized, downsized, or unused VMs.

Reallocate storage and memory between virtual environments as per business needs. What type of buyer are you? Most buyers of virtualization software fall into one of these categories: Small businesses less than employees : These are startups and small organizations that work with a small group of IT developers, freelancers, testers, and programmers to build a technological product.

Software tools providing virtualization on desktops with multiple OS support and group sharing features are ideal for them. These software solutions are cheaper than business-grade versions and provide easy-to-setup virtual machines with minuscule downtime.

Midsize businesses from to employees : These buyers have a small employee base with growing IT requirements. But they expect to host fewer virtual machines compared with large businesses. They opt for virtualization software with desktop as well as server virtualization options to be able to control the workload centrally as their teams work remotely. They look for slightly more advanced features than small businesses, such as virtual desktop infrastructure VDI , multi-factor authentication, and easy data migration.

Another aspect of determining a good fit for software for these buyers is to assess the compatibility of existing hardware, including CPU, RAM, and hard drive storage, with the workload they plan to manage on the virtual systems. Large businesses over employees : These buyers are large IT organizations comprising different teams and departments with varying business needs.

They have deeper customization and integration requirements than SMBs. As such, they will need a solution with server virtualization that can allow for scalability of virtual machines, and storage virtualization to have more control of their data and information. These buyers should opt for a full-featured solution that offers advanced virtual machine monitoring or Type 1 hypervisor support, easy integration and deployment, configuration management, storage virtualization, disaster recovery, and responsive customer support.

They should also look at the compatibility of old applications with hardware virtualization so that the data can be easily shared with the virtual machines. This dramatically reduces the costs of acquiring the physical servers and the prices associated with storing and cooling them. Beyond savings on physical servers, virtual desktops save companies in software licensing costs by distributing computing power between users. Improved business resilience: Virtualization technology makes a return to normalcy faster after a disaster.

It allows businesses to back up mission-critical applications on a few servers stored at an alternate location, and live migration enables businesses to resume productivity with minimum to no interruption. This enables IT teams to become much more adaptable and responsive to business needs.

Key Considerations Listed below are some key considerations to keep in mind when purchasing a virtualization tool. Discuss your needs with team members first. Understand your workload requirements and jot down a list of must-haves versus good-to-have virtualization features.

Also, take a look at the licensing costs versus the total cost of ownership. After that, select a tool that best offers what you need without stressing your budget. Maintain your system by preventing unapproved changes from altering your virtual machine and the host machine.

Move data from a virtual machine without suffering data loss or service lags. Create and manage multiple virtual environments on one physical machine and deploy different operating systems and applications. Regulate user rights to certain areas of the host or virtual machine by setting permissions and issuing passwords. Create backups of your virtual machine within the system or remotely to save all of your data and the entire configuration, and resume productivity even if the system breaks down or requires an upgrade.

Monitor the performance of virtual machines and track the oversized, downsized, or unused VMs. However, ultimately you need to choose the best virtualization option for your network and infrastructure setup. All these need monitoring tools to keep an eye on performance, as virtual machines and their accompanying virtual environments come with unique challenges.

When you use virtualization software and run virtual machines, you need to ensure you track behavior, capacity, and performance. For this purpose, most enterprises will use virtual machine management tools operating independently of the hypervisor or virtualization software.

Monitoring is important because virtual environments have different challenges from physical environments. Essentially, physical machines working with physical hardware can only use what the physical hardware has available. The virtual environment should be treated, not one machine at a time, since you need to keep an eye on your entire virtual infrastructure to reduce VM sprawl and scale effectively. All the above tasks are easier with the right software. It can also provide information on your entire virtual infrastructure, such as host machines, VMs, cluster organization, virtual storage such as vSANs, and performance metrics.

I also like its free day trial , so you can test it out for yourself. The virtualization software you choose depends to a large extent on what operating systems your current devices already run and what infrastructure you have set up.

It also depends on what level of security you need, whether you want bare metal or hosted hypervisors, and what kinds of operating systems you want to virtualize. As I mentioned above, there are a few big players on the market, but ultimately you need to choose what fits with what your company is trying to do. In all cases, you need to ensure your virtual machines and accompanying software are functioning correctly and performing well, and for this I recommend using a comprehensive monitoring software.

My top choice is SolarWinds Virtualization Manager , because of its ease of use, numerous features, and cost-effective pricing. Desktop virtualization. Most people are already familiar with desktop virtualization. This is where instead of an operating system being installed on the physical hardware of a computer, a software layer exists between the hardware and the virtual desktop. This software is called a hypervisor , and can be installed directly on the hardware.

You can also install an operating system first such as Windows , then install the hypervisor on top of the OS. The hypervisor could then, for instance, set up a virtual machine running Linux. This way, you could use Windows on your computer and a Linux virtual machine.

This is particularly useful for testing applications on different operating systems or software in development. Application virtualization. The next kind of virtualization most people have used is called application virtualization. You might use this to run a Mac-only application on a Windows device, for instance. Network virtualization. Networks can be virtualized by collecting network resources such as switches, routers, and other network infrastructure.

The collective abilities of those resources can then be aggregated, and the entire network managed as one entity. If network usage is variable, by virtualizing the network you can then allocate and distribute resources more efficiently and keep performance stable and high. Storage virtualization. This is when storage from multiple physical storage devices is combined and treated as one storage device like network resources above.

The virtual storage can then be managed as one storage device, and you can allocate, change, move, and set up resources more flexibly across your infrastructure as needed. Virtualization software can be defined as a kind of a computer program which helps in achieving IT abstraction, to make it clear it can be said as it helps in hiding or masking the physical resources from the end-user.

In this article, we will see what Virtualization Software is, and how to achieve virtualization using it. Virtualization can be explained as the computer inside another computer generally, it is used to share the computer resources and reduce the cost of infrastructure by the businesses, there are different software and platforms available in the market to achieve virtualization.

We will also discuss how different software is used to achieve this. This is a guide to Virtualization Softwares. Here we discuss an introduction, definition of Virtualization Softwares with benefits and the top 9 Virtualization Softwares in the market.