A hypervisor is software used to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, with their own operating systems and applications.

Hypervisors have been disrupting the market for some time, mainly impacting large, secure, and private digital estates. Recent changes to licensing structures in the hypervisor world have significantly increased costs for large, secure, and private cloud setups. This has left many organisations with high expenditures for their existing setup. 

As a result, organisations have the choice of maintaining their existing hypervisors at an increased operating cost or choosing to migrate. For organisations looking to switch to a new hypervisor, their approach must be carefully considered. Each IT asset must be found, assessed, redesigned, and aligned with the company’s IT strategy.

Public clouds are growing comparatively faster than private cloud infrastructure. For many, it’s simply easier to utilise public cloud services such as Azure VM, AWS EC2, and Google Compute Engine, rather than face the somewhat daunting task of managing the underlying software for virtual machines on your own hardware.

So, do we need private cloud environments? 

“Noisy neighbours” is a phrase coined by the excessive use of resources by co-tenants in the public cloud. As a result, this noisy neighbour effect could negatively impact the performance of those co-sharing the infrastructure. You often have little control over who shares a public cloud with you, similarly to how you may have no control over who moves in next door to your home. 

With private cloud, this noisy neighbour effect can be avoided, therefore leaving occupants safe from interference. However, those who opt for a private cloud must weigh up a trade-off between security and user experience. The choice is dependent on the application’s needs and performance requirements, such as ensuring quick responses in critical environments with the right settings and bandwidth.

For those looking to embrace the hypervisor, it is essential to understand the application’s underlying cloud infrastructure, end-user network access options to the cloud infrastructure and the right pre-integrated management tools that can tweak performance on a real-time basis.

Hypervisors are split into two categories:

• Type-1 hypervisors

These are known as bare-metal hypervisors. They run directly on the physical hardware, managing guest operating systems without the need for a host OS.

• Type-2 hypervisors

These are known as hosted hypervisors. They run on a host OS, managing guest operating systems as applications.

An enterprise application must operate for internal end-user compute devices, as well as certain consumer-facing devices, and to certain users at multiple global locations. Such applications are typically certified to run on a Type-1 hypervisor. 

Recent changes in licensing models, mainly the move from perpetual licensing to a subscription-based model, for some Type-1 hypervisors have significantly impacted IT strategies and operations as costs increase. 

Although Type-1 hypervisors may offer marginal performance advantages for certain applications when compared to Type-2 hypervisors, this difference can be significant when scaled across multiple public and private cloud infrastructures.

It may seem that public cloud would be the natural option. However, under certain circumstances, cloud repatriation (i.e. moving data, applications, and services from public to private clouds) is necessary. 

For organisations contemplating migration, there are several key considerations:

• Assessing current infrastructure and applications
• Defining clear migration objectives
• Choosing the right migration strategy (e.g., lift-and-shift, re-platforming, or refactoring)
• Planning for data migration and security
• Testing and validation
• Training and change management

Recognising the importance of networking in cloud environments is crucial, as this is often underrated, despite being a critical component.

Understanding the many components of hypervisors and ensuring that migration goes smoothly without putting systems at risk or experiencing significant downtime is a big task. Our experts are experienced in migrating complex customer environments on legacy cloud, to a combination of large-scale cloud providers and private clouds. They leverage different hypervisors, including open-source technologies along with Global Fabric, our Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform. 

Whilst it’s relatively straightforward to understand and monitor physical resources such as compute, memory, storage, and network, modern application now use virtual resources. These include virtual compute and memory, Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS), and hybrid networks (a mix of cloud and enterprise networks).

An example is organisations in regulated and sensitive industries. Such organisations are typically subject to very strict regulations regarding where data is stored and how it is protected. 

An enterprise application may be required to handle two types of database tasks:

1. OLAP (Online Analytical Processing): Analysing large amounts of data.
2. OLTP (Online Transaction Processing): Managing many small transactions quickly.

A reliable and secure system is required. In this instance, a combination of on-premises and cloud services (Hybrid Cloud) is managed by subject matter experts with the right tools to ensure everything runs smoothly and securely. For example, an enterprise application might combine core banking and online banking, running on multiple cloud platforms.