I was told the investments on IT infrastructure purchases were cut down in my company for various reasons. At the same time there was tremendous pressure to decrease data centre power consumption as there was exponential growth in demand for processing power and data storage capacity. 

Virtualisation was my next step. Virtualisation allows one computer to run multiple OS, perform jobs of multiple computers, save on space, cost of power and cooling and with the existing hardware.

Traditionally, a single operating system and a single application was used per server where up to 80 to 90 per cent of the computing capacity remained unused at any one time.

Virtualisation is now an industry standard approach for data consolidation. A virtual environment will help IT operations in several ways. And there are cons too. As it enables multiple applications to share physical hardware, it lowers requirements for data centre space and volume of server hardware to be purchased.
Virtualisation doesn’t pertain just to CPU but it works at all levels of the infrastructure like operating system, server, storage, desktop, application virtualisation etc.

Operating System virtualisation method uses a standard operating system such as Windows or Linux as the host and a virtual manager will run multiple operating systems. The server Virtualisation software runs on the hardware and the operating systems will be installed on top of it. Storage virtualisation is a large disk partitioned into smaller logical disks and assigned to users who can access it as a network drive.

Virtualisation provides flexibility for enterprises to deploy products, services faster and expand into new markets. But it can sometimes become complex in terms of performance, availability, upgrades and installing patches. It would require new skill sets and methodologies.