The small business guide to virtualisation

There’s nothing new about virtualisation. Virtual machines were originally conceived of back in the 1960s, as a way of achieving clean, secure multitasking on mainframe hardware. Subsequently, in the personal computer age, desktop virtualisation became popular as a way to run software across different operating system, with Mac-based hosts such as Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion allowing users to run Windows applications in a virtual environment on their Intel-based hardware.

Today’s virtualisation tools can still fulfil those roles, and there are plenty of other benefits, too – which is why businesses of all sizes are increasingly making use of virtualisation throughout their operations.

How does virtualisation work?

Virtualisation is handled by a piece of software called a hypervisor, which can create and host one or more virtual environments inside a single physical computer (or computing cluster). Each environment functions as a complete, standalone computer, with its own operating system and applications –