One extremely effective way of enhancing the efficiency of your cloud setup is through using hypervisors to virtualise resources.
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What is a hypervisor?
Before virtualisation and hypervisors became mainstream, most physical servers and computers ran a single operating system. On the one hand, it allowed the system to be more stable and minimised the potential failure domain, as each server handled requests from only one operating system and typically a single application. However, it also made the hardware single-tasking, resulting in a waste of computing resources. This situation forced organisations to spend large amounts on constantly expanding their IT fleets, which were not being used to their full potential.
Hypervisors and virtualisation have helped solve this problem.
A hypervisor is a type of software that enables the creation and control of virtual machines (VMs) and allocates the host server’s virtual resources (vCPU, RAM, storage space) as needed by each VM.
Hypervisors play a critical role in enabling server virtualisation, which is an essential part of cloud computing. More broadly, virtualisation involves using software to mimic or imitate physical resources. The hypervisor abstracts and separates the VMs and their programmes from the actual server hardware, making it possible to use physical resources more efficiently, simplifying maintenance and operations, and reducing costs.
Hypervisor technology also enables organisations to better manage changing workloads and easily scale resources without the need for additional physical servers, allowing for better resource optimisation.
Types of hypervisors?
There are two main types of hypervisors:
Type 1 hypervisors: these run directly on the hardware, bypassing the need for a separate operating system, minimising latency and maximising hardware performance.
Type 1 hypervisors are scalable for expanding workloads and support diverse hardware platforms, making them ideal for cloud, on-premise, and edge computing. For these reasons, this type of hypervisor is usually utilised by enterprise-grade infrastructure due to its performance capabilities and broad applicability across diverse environments.
Type 2 hypervisors: these operate as an application on top of an existing operating system. They can be more cost-effective as they have no dedicated hardware requirement.
Type 2 hypervisors can be deployed on desktops or laptops for testing or educational purposes, so they tend to be used by home users, developers and in teaching but are not typically suited for enterprise-grade applications due to resulting potential performance limitations.
The most popular hypervisors of the first type are VMware ESXi, Proxmox VE and Nutanix AHV. The on-demand hypervisors of the second type include VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, and Oracle VirtualBox.
Key benefits
Without the virtualisation enabled by hypervisors, hosting architecture would require a significantly higher number of physical servers, each needing individual space, maintenance, and management. Virtualisation allows more efficient use of space and resources, enables centralised management of VMs, and brings cost savings by maximising the resources per physical server, meaning utilising less physical hardware for the same performance.
Hypervisors therefore help release limits on scalability, allowing resources to be adjusted as demand changes, whether for planned increases like eCommerce sales or unexpected traffic spikes. This ensures organisations only pay for the resources they need when they need them, avoiding the cost of unused resources.
Hypervisors in practice
To illustrate how hypervisors can be used to easily handle fluctuating workloads without costs rocketing, we can look at Hyve Managed Hosting’s partnership with the National Television Awards here in the UK. For the awards, we designed a bespoke, load-balanced cloud solution within which we host two virtual servers on our managed enterprise cloud platform.
The voting is carried out predominantly online in two stages over the summer leading up to the September ceremony. This means Indigo Television (the NTAs production partner) needed a cloud solution that could handle big spikes in traffic while not wasting resources during non-voting periods.
Using hypervisors in this setup allowed us to increase server resources by 24 times without adding any physical hardware, providing a fair and consistent voting process and ensuring that everyone who wanted to vote could do so without interruption.
If we had experienced unprecedented traffic during this busy period, we would have been able to dynamically increase resources again in real-time to accommodate it and ensure there was no downtime. Our cloud architects could then easily dial back resources once spikes in traffic had subsided to cut out unnecessary resource usage and keep the costs low for the customer.
Examples like this paint a clear picture of how individual organisations have distinct needs when it comes to their cloud setups. It’s crucial that businesses constantly monitor the health of their cloud stacks in order to make sure they’re unlocking maximum benefits for minimal cost.
Equipped with knowledge about cloud components such as hypervisors, business leaders and their IT teams are in a better position to interrogate their cloud approach and make sure configurations are tuned to their individual business needs.
This shouldn’t be a one-off exercise either. Whether it’s through hiring a dedicated cloud architect or working with a managed service provider (MSP), after unlocking the enhanced scalability and efficiencies offered by deploying hypervisors, businesses have to continuously monitor workloads in order to maintain peak performance, implement timely updates and make sure resources aren’t being wasted. Only then can they truly access the core benefits of the cloud.
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