A Hypervisor, also known as a Virtual Machine Monitor or VMM, is software that creates and manages virtual machines (VMs). A hypervisor allows a computer to maintain many guest VMs by virtually sharing its resources, such as memory and processing.
Hypervisors can be used personally to run multiple operating systems on your own computer. For example, a user can have a MacBook Pro as their physical computer, but using a hypervisor they can run a Windows OS.
Hypervisors are used by companies to balance the computing needs of various types of servers efficiently by sharing a common core of CPU, Memory, and storage across a variety of production servers. CyberHoot runs all of its infrastructure on a series of virtual machines orchestrated by a Hypervisor.
Advantages of Virtualization and Hypervisors:
There are many advantages to using hypervisors and containers to operate your computing resources including:
- Supportability: patching is simplified with virtual machines.
- Availability: if a virtual machine has an issue it can be restarted quickly and easily.
- Security: virtual machines allow for more segmentation and protection of the operating system.
- Resource Utilization: since most computing hardware is idle most of the time, allowing individual components of your infrastructure to share resources means better utilization, performance, and scalability.
- Monitoring, Management, and Reporting: all Hypervisors have built-in monitoring, management, and reporting tools to allow you to keep a close watch on things ensuring smooth sailing with your infrastructure.
Should SMBs Consider Hypervisors and Containers?
Certainly. There are many Cloud solutions available for building out your computing infrastructure needs. Hypervisors and the containers they manage is a smart way to get the most value and computing horsepower for your needs. CyberHoot would also suggest you consider leveraging the SaaS marketplace for specific services and needs (SalesForce, QuickBooks Online, CyberHoot, and ADP as examples) instead of building and owning your own infrastructure for some things.
Additional Reading: Companies Team Up On Embedded Hypervisor Technology
Related Terms: Virtual Private Network (VPN), Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN)