A hypervisor is an essential piece of technology that allows for management and sharing of physical and network compute resources, as well as the operation of multiple operating systems within a network of virtual machines.
Virtual Machines are simply computer software files that behave like an actual computer. Virtualization allows a company to share Virtual Machines (VMs) across many locations or systems. The hypervisor manages the physical hardware and allocates the necessary software resources. When a VM is running and a user or program requires additional resources from the physical environment, the hypervisor schedules the request to the physical system’s resources so that the virtual machine’s operating system and applications can access the shared pool of physical resources.
But if you’re new to hypervisors – or have had the technology for a while – there are some key things to consider before starting or migrating your system; the biggest ones being its portability and cost.
Commercial Hypervisors
While there are many hypervisor options, some of the most popular, such as (VMware and Hyper-V) are proprietary and lock you into their ecosystem – so because of the long-term impact, it’s important to make the right choice for your company and IT team. These proprietary systems require a very large investment to get started and often require the purchase of multiple user licenses per computer. In addition, there are ongoing annual licensing and support costs. While many large organizations find false security in a big brand name – they must be comfortable with significant ongoing expenses and being handcuffed to a proprietary system.
Data Holdings’ Hypervisor
Data Holdings uses KVM as its “Infrastructure as a Service” hypervisor. KVM and is entirely open source, utilizing software that was developed and used by IBM. KVM is now widely adopted by the public cloud companies (think Amazon, etc.). Data Holdings’ customers pay zero licensing costs for use of the KVM hypervisor. Hardware is supported along with the hypervisor – which means your company continues to run your OS and Apps, and we keep the physical Infrastructure up and running.
