The benefits of VMware for your business

The benefits of VMware for your business

As its name implies, the use of VMware – or ‘Virtual Machine’ ware – creates a virtual machine on your computer.

This can help businesses better manage their resources and make them more efficient.

Indeed, the use of ‘virtualisation’ on a business server has many advantages, including reduced IT costs.

Virtualisation also enables businesses to get the most out of their investment in hardware and resources by using various constraints, scheduling and partitioning to increase the flexibility of the computing environment.

VMware allows businesses to run multiple application and operating system workloads on the one server – thus enabling better resource management.

By creating a virtual machine that behaves exactly like an actual computer – VMware also allows everything running on that virtual machine to run in its own window.

This means IT service providers can install an operating system and the software of their choice on as many ‘virtual machines’ as they like – with each one stored as a file on the hard drive.

One of the biggest advantages of running VMware is you can install and test software without it affecting your actual computer.

Another advantage is you can run software on a virtual machine that may not work on the operating system that you have installed.

For example, if you have a Mac, you can install Windows on a virtual machine to allow yourself to run Windows programs.

Similarly, if you have a PC with a recent version of Windows, you can use a VMware virtual machine to run a program designed for an older version of Windows.

The use of VMware is particularly suitable for new businesses that are growing quickly.

It is much safer – as if you experience a problem with a virtual machine – you can simply delete it and create a new version.

In all cases, your physical computer remains operational.

With businesses, a VMware virtual machine can be used to test new operating system updates and patches in a safe environment before those updates are deployed to physical computers.

This is much more efficient, because – since all server workloads vary – the use of virtualisation allows the spreading of work to underutilised servers.

It also speeds up performance and helps prevent unnecessary downtime.

Of course, using VMware can have some drawbacks.

For instance, not all servers and applications are ‘virtualisation-friendly’ -and therefore may not support it.

However, because virtualisation is highly scalable, it does allow businesses to easily create the extra resources needed by many applications.

It does this by adding extra servers on an ‘as-needs’ basis – with no significant extra investment in time or money.

And it means most IT service providers can create new servers very quickly – as they no longer need to purchase new hardware whenever a new server is needed.

New businesses, however, do need to be careful not to get ‘carried away’ with the ease and simplicity of adding the new servers.

This is because once administrators realise just how easy it can be to add new servers – they sometimes set up servers for almost anything – leading to an oversupply that can create more headaches than it solves.

With Mike Peeters Media