IT infrastructure must be able to cope with the needs of the business:
- Serve customers.
- Store the right amount of data.
- Allow applications to be developed and released on time.
The company incurs losses if the system cannot close the tasks and quickly allocate the right amount of resources when the load increases. Virtualization will help overcome the shortage of IT infrastructure. We will tell you what it is and what the clouds have to do with it.
What Is Infrastructure Scarcity And Why Scale It?
Traditional IT infrastructure is built on a certain number of physical servers. Often several applications are installed on one server, but they are not isolated and cannot work independently of each other. If one application “pulls” the server resources onto itself or “eats up” all its resources due to an error, the rest freeze.
There is an approach when each server is used by one application. This structure helps to ensure that the application is adequately resourced and isolated from other applications so that its failures do not affect the system’s operation. However, buying a separate server for each corporate service is not always desirable.
Another problem arises when the load on the traditional IT infrastructure grows, and there is a shortage of it – there is not enough capacity for the correct operation of applications. Then additional resources are required – you need to buy new servers or replace them with more powerful ones. Adding new resources to the IT infrastructure is called scaling.
The scaling of a traditional IT infrastructure often comes with downtime, i.e., stopping the application while being migrated from a less powerful server to a more powerful one.
In addition, the number of physical servers grows linearly with increasing load and the cost of purchasing and maintaining equipment. Virtualization will help avoid a shortage of IT infrastructure and make scaling more flexible.
What Is IT Infrastructure Virtualization
Infrastructure virtualization is when computing resources are abstracted away from physical hardware. Its many iron servers are not related to how many working servers are for applications. For example, you can “cut” one iron server into many virtual ones or, conversely, “merge” several iron ones into one powerful virtual server for a demanding application. This is the essence of abstraction.
In this case, computing processes running on one real server or server cluster are isolated.
A component that combines a pool of physical resources (processors, memory, hard drives) into a pool of virtualized resources and divides them into virtual servers is called a hypervisor. This is a unique operating system that is installed on physical servers. The hypervisor cuts the resulting “pie,” a pool of virtual servers, into “pieces.” On each of the “pieces” – a separate virtual server – they install their own guest operating systems and applications.
Also Read: Infrastructure Autoscaling: How This Technology Helps Reduce IT Costs
