The following blog series will explain and tackle the concept of 'Virtualisation'. A somewhat common term in the IT world - it is now being increasingly used within the world of manufacturing and infrastructure.
Wikipedia describes Virtualisation as 'a term that refers to the various techniques, methods or approaches of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a virtual hardware platform, operating system (OS), storage device, or network resources'.
Virtualisation is essentially taking traditional hardware like servers and reducing the number of physical machines by converting most of them to virtual machines located within fewer of these physical devices.
For example you could take 30 physical servers and reduce them to 5 physical servers that each have 6 virtual servers running inside them.
- Application Virtualisation - Delivers applications to users from a central, controlled environment instead of managing each desktop.
- Within the typical industrial facility, including manufacturing plants, utilities and processing companies, has many important software applications that can be virtualised. Software like Human Machine Interface (HMI) applications, process data historians and manufacturing execution systems (MES) along with other analytic and reporting applications can all be virtualised.
- Desktop Virtualisation - Same as application virtualisation except a user receives an complete desktop environment.
- Server Virtualisation - Creates multiple software-based servers on single physical server boxes. By creating these virtual machines industrial IT departments can seriously reduce the burden and time of maintaining the physical infrastructure.
- Storage Virtualisation - Uses multiple physical storage devices to create customised network storage.
Next Week: The benefits of Virtualisation
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