A hypervisor is a brilliant 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.
A Virtual Machine is a computer software file that behaves 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 (VMware and Hyper-V by Microsoft) are proprietary and lock you in to their ecosystem – so 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 multiple user licenses per computer. In addition there are ongoing licensing and support costs. While many large organizations find false security in a big brand names – they have to be okay with significant ongoing expenses and being handcuffed to the proprietary system.
Stack41 Hypervisor
The Stack41 “Infrastructure as a Service” hypervisor is entirely open source, utilizing software that was developed and used by IBM – and is now widely adopted by many public cloud companies (think Amazon, etc.). The Stack41 hypervisor requires no licensing costs for the customer to pay. 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.
How Stack41 can save your company tens of thousands of dollars a year – or more! (Seriously.)
There are no hardware acquisition costs when working with Stack41. Capex: ZERO. (Really!)
Stack41 monitors the hypervisor and hardware 24x7. Your applications are in a highly available data center that features:
- 24x7 on site security
- Redundant power feeds, redundant generators, redundant UPSes and power supplies
- Redundant Internet and WAN connections