You’re probably familiar with the usual benefits of virtual machines—less rack space, smaller data centers and green initiatives. Here are a few other less touted advantages worthy of mention:
1. Safe sandbox. Creating a second operating system on your computer lets you do things you normally wouldn’t be able to do on a regular system. For instance, virtual machines let you test scenarios and new applications before global deployments. If your operating crashes or becomes instable, it won’t impact other virtual servers on the same machine.
2. Rapid provisioning. Remember in the old days when you had to fill out a purchase order, wait for shipping and then rack, stack and cable a new machine? Virtualization lets you fill requests for a new server almost immediately. Demobilizing a server is likewise a breeze.
3. Legacy applications. Almost every business has one or two legacy applications it needs to maintain on old versions of operating systems. You can run those old applications on a virtual environment. This ensures that your IT planning won’t be restricted by a few applications.
4. Less hardware to hassle with. Virtual machines are a lot easier to manage than real ones. You can accomplish hardware upgrades using a management console application rather than having to power down the machine, install the hardware, verify the change and then power up again.
5. Snapshots. Most virtual machine software comes with snapshot and rollback capabilities, which enable you to capture the state, data and hardware configuration of a running virtual machine, and then revert back if something goes amiss. In testing, a snapshot provides and an easy way to recreate a specific state or condition so that you can troubleshoot a problem.
6. Mobility. Most virtual machine software stores a whole disk in the guest environment as a single file in the host environment. Transferring a virtual machine to different physical machine is as easy as moving over the virtual disk file and some configuration files. Deploying another copy of a virtual machine is the same as transferring a virtual machine, except that instead of moving the files, you copy them.
7. Security. One often overlooked feature of virtual machines is security. The ability to keep the dangerous parts of a computer away from the other parts of your system is a big benefit. You can use a virtual machine to store important data such as passwords, financial and other information. If a virus infects a separate machine on the same system, your data is safe, as long as you continue to use a reliable backup and recovery system.
To learn more about keeping your data safe and backup and recovery on virtual machines, visit AppAssure: http://www.appassure.com
and download a free trial version of Backup and Replication software: http://go.appassure.com/free-trial?LeadSource=nonpaid_replay_trial
George Gaudi is an writer, consultant, networking engineer, and expert in the technology field. He has been in the backup and recovery field for almost 8 years.
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