Virtualisation – What’s all the fuss?

“Virtualisation technology allows multiple virtual machines to run different operating systems, such as Windows, Linux and UNIX on a single computer. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware resources (e.g., CPU, RAM, Hard Drive, etc.) allowing the operating system to run as if it were installed on a physical machine.” (CIO.com)

The simplest way to define virtualisation is that it implies the disassociation of software from any form of specific hardware (i.e. server).  As such, software applications or data are no longer tied to specific machine.

What makes virtualisation so attractive to enterprises and IT departments is the potential cost saving factors.  So let’s first have a look at some of these benefits.

• Virtualising your servers prepares your enterprise for the cloud.  First, you would move from a basic virtualised data centre to a private cloud and eventually move into a cloud hosting environment.
• Consolidation of servers to virtual servers leads to fewer physical serves resulting in lower cooling and power costs in the data centre.
• Fuller utilisation of fewer physical servers. This also means fewer machines and fewer numbers of racks leading to less data centre floor space requirements.
• Removal of the dependency on particular hardware and of being locked into particular vendors because server virtualisation subtracts away the physical hardware and replaces it with virtual hardware.
• Ability to easily move virtual machines between servers when a legacy server needs to be deactivated or removed for servicing.

You will find this video very helpful in getting a good grasp on Server Virtualisation: 

 

Virtualisation is currently making head roads in 3 areas of IT, in particular, Network Virtualisation, Storage Virtualisation and Server Virtualisation.  What we touched on above relates mainly to Server Virtualisation and we will discuss the other areas in future posts.

However, if you are interested in the topic of virtualisation and looking for a bit of direction, here are a few areas to venture into.

•  Hypervisor is the software that bridges the physical hardware with the operating system and applications.
• Virtual Machine (VM) is the self-contained operating environment.
• Virtual Appliance (VA) is a pre-built and configured application in the operating system inside a VM.
• Xen is a free, open-source hypervisor for x86 (a family of instruction set architectures based on the Intel 8086).

Basecamp for Project Management - Review

Recently we used Basecamp to manage a web build for a client and we found it to be one of the easiest-to-use project management tools.

Basecamp is an online project management tool that allows you to keep all the communications for your projects in the one place and if you currently rifle through emails looking for bits of communication and attachments associated with your projects, then Basecamp is by far the better option.

Basecamp provides a very effective way of setting project milestones, checklists and communications.   The trick to making Basecamp a success we found was to get people into the habit of using it for all communications relating to the project including any outside communications such as action points discussed in meetings and notes made from telephone communications etc.

One of the features of basecamp is the opting out of notification when they are irrelevant to you and the ability to create multiple to-do lists per project.  As an example, for our web build project, we were able to create, assign and track separate checklists for the Chinese, Korean and English versions of the builds and tick each action point off as they were completed.


Here is a good Basecamp introductory instructional video we found on YouTube: 

If you currently use email to manage projects and to transfer assets and if you are unfamiliar with using project management tools, we would recommend Basecamp to any company looking to get organised, streamline business processes and keep projects moving in the right direction.

For all of your more complex projects where you need to manage multiple stakeholders, deadlines, resources, management of assets and signoffs, we would definitely recommend integrating basecamp into your project planning and delivery.