Virtualisation

XS-PRO's commitment to remaining at the forefront of technology changes means that we adopted Virtualisation solutions in their early stages.
Our staff are already familiar with

• Microsoft Virtual PC and Virtual Server
• VMWare Workstation and Server
• VMWare ESX Server

We can provide virtual machine solutions onsite and offsite to suit your evolving business needs.
You may choose to opt for a virtualisation solution for any one or all of the following scenarios

• Lab testing
• Software demonstrations
• Feasibility/ Suitability of new software
• Maintaining of legacy software, while moving to new platforms
• Improving disaster prevention (see Disaster prevention section)
• Consolidating physical servers to reduce cost and administration
• Software isolation (for security purposes)

Some advantages that application virtualisation has over conventional distributed computing environments:

• Faster delivery of higher quality applications.
• Lower total cost of software ownership
• Reduction in the number of servers needed.
• Increased system reliability
• Geometric scalability
• Better performance
• Reduced administration, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance costs

Preferred Uses For Application Virtualisation

Common applications include:

• Supply chain management
• Electronic commerce
• Financial applications
• Insurance applications
• Complex adaptive systems
• Business types of business simulations

From Wikipedia: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization

Virtualisation examples

The following examples illustrate recent applications of virtualisation.

Server consolidation

Virtual machines are used to consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers, which in turn host virtual machines. Each physical server is reflected as a virtual machine "guest" residing on a virtual machine host system. This is also known as Physical-to-Virtual or 'P2V' transformation.

Disaster recovery

Virtual machines can be used as "hot standby" environments for physical production servers. This changes the classical "backup-and-restore" philosophy, by providing backup images that can "boot" into live virtual machines, capable of taking over workload for a production server experiencing an outage.

Testing and training

Hardware virtualisation can give root access to a virtual machine. This can be very useful such as in kernel development and operating system courses.