Hypervisor-agnosticism as a Key to Cost-Efficient Virtualization

Virtualization is a great way to cut energy costs, even up to 80%, with an additional 31% when creating a hyper-converged infrastructure. It stands as a pivotal technology for running and managing diverse systems crucial to your company’s operations. To create such a solution, you must choose a hypervisor, which allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host. You should also look for a solution that lets you avoid vendor lock-in and allows for flexible management, tailored to your company’s needs and resources, to achieve the most cost-efficient result.

Hypervisors facilitate centralized management by implementing a hyper-converged infrastructure, empowering you to swiftly detect and address any disruptions across all virtual machines. This centralized oversight is instrumental in layering protection over your IT infrastructure, fortifying the resilience of your business against potential threats.

Selecting the right hypervisor is a critical decision that aligns with your company’s specific needs. It’s not just about choosing any software; it’s about finding a hypervisor that resonates with your operational requirements, owned resources, and scalability aspirations. Understanding the significance of virtualization, the next question to ponder is: which hypervisor will be best to help you achieve your business goals? Let’s take a look at the most important aspects you need to take into consideration.

Which Virtualization Solution Is Best for My Company?

Finding the answer can be complicated, as everything depends on your company’s needs and resources. Don’t worry though – we are here to help you identify the most important factors you should consider before the final purchase decision. You can choose from many hypervisors, which let your IT team run different systems and share access to them with respective users. At this stage, it is important to cooperate with the IT team and determine the list of basic requirements:

What Are the Needs of Your Company?

The types of processes that take place within your company will let your IT team create a list of the exact parameters that the chosen virtualization solution should match. Firstly, you should determine, what systems your business needs for successful operations. Then, it is important to point out what types of applications these systems include. As systems are used by people, you should also get to know what specific teams’ / users’ needs are in terms of using those systems. Finally, you should determine what are employees’ needs in terms of storing edited and produced data. Answers to these questions should guide your choice when deciding on a specific hypervisor.

How Much Do Hypervisors Cost?

Hypervisors have 3 main types when it comes to their pricing:

• Free, open-source solutions. These are perfect for IT professionals with extended knowledge and experience, as these solutions will require them to set up most of the features themselves.
• Freemium solutions – meaning that the base product is provided for free, but there are also additional features which can be unlocked with a fee.
• Completely paid solutions. These can be expensive, but at the same time, they come with a complete set of already configured features, along with their updates.

When it comes to general numbers, these can vary a lot, from free solutions to paid ones that reach even tens of thousands of dollars per year. Everything depends on the skill set owned by your company and the specific needs of your organization.

Virtualization Skill Requirements

The price is often connected to the knowledge needed to manage it. Some solutions are relatively easy to use, and intuitive even for less experienced users, while others require extended knowledge and exceptional skills, especially in terms of open-source solutions. This also leads us to another question – what are the current skills of your IT team – will they be able to use the specific hypervisor efficiently? If not – you must also take into consideration their training or even hire a new employee who already has experience working with this specific solution.

As you can see, there are tons of variables that need to be taken into consideration when choosing a hypervisor, and yet there is one more obstacle to overcome.

Technical Support for Different Hypervisors

Open-source support is usually done by a community where everyone helps to fix issues. The good thing is getting many ideas, but remember, this form does not include 24/7 contact and support. In many cases, your team will have to spend some time searching for the right description of a solution that matches the current problem.

Corporate support costs more but gives the guarantee of assistance. They’ll work with your IT team to solve any spotted issues. It is a perfect solution if you want to deal with problems as soon as possible, but as we mentioned – it comes with a cost.

What Are The Benefits Of Hypervisor-Agnosticism?

Finding a hypervisor that fits your company is one thing, but finding a hypervisor that will work fluently with the data storage solution you use – here is where another challenge arises. That is why it is so important to ensure that the software used to manage your company’s data storage is hypervisor-agnostic. This feature grants you high compatibility and thus gives you more flexibility in terms of choosing a hypervisor that most precisely matches your virtualization needs.

Yet, this is not the only advantage of hypervisor-agnosticism. As it grants you freedom in terms of choosing your software foundation for virtualization, it also empowers you to migrate to another hypervisor. The need for changing the hypervisor can be caused by many things, like, for example drastic rise in the product price or a solution being withdrawn from the market.

With hypervisor-agnosticism, you gain technological resilience from the unexpected changes in the virtualization solutions market, and thus, you become more independent from the vendor lock-in. This, in turn, lets you easily implement a new hypervisor to run your VMs. Yet here again, you must keep in mind that different hypervisors have different requirements. This includes both the hardware requirements and human resources with their knowledge and skills to operate different systems. Managing those is a challenge you can easily deal with, thanks to hypervisor-agnosticism, as it opens many possible ways for you to choose from.

A Solution That Matches Any Hypervisor!

Open-E approach is simple – use our software to create a virtualized system tailored to your business needs. The best virtualization solution, in our opinion, is the one that perfectly matches not only your budget but also company resources as a whole – including your IT team’s talent and knowledge. Thus with our data storage software –
Open-E JovianDSS – your company can build its systems flexibly and safely while avoiding overpaying for the utilized virtualization solution. Our solution also lets you migrate from one hypervisor to another if needed. Don’t let your systems be limited due to unexpected hypervisor-related changes. Raise your virtualization flexibility, run a resilient business, and benefit from the freedom granted by hypervisor-agnosticism.