Type 2 hypervisors differ from Type 1s in that they run as an app within the underlying computer’s existing OS. The technology allows users to create “guest” VMs that have access to the host operating system’s resources.
Developers tend to be the biggest users of Type 2 hypervisors, says Brent Ellis, senior analyst at Forrester. Sometimes they turn to the technology to test a particular app within a particular OS, “but it can also allow you to run certain programs that otherwise may not work on your computer,” Ellis says.
Ellis personally uses a Type 2 hypervisor called Parallels to run Windows on his Mac, for example. And in a previous job in IT support, he’d often turn to the same technology for clients who’d bought new devices that weren’t readily compatible with important business applications, he says.
Which Hypervisor Is Right for an Agency?
While developers and engineers leverage Type 2 hypervisors to easily access alternate operating systems, the majority of agencies use the bare-metal versions both for the robust security they provide and to improve resource utilization.
Agencies with small IT teams, for example, will turn to Type 1 hypervisors to stretch limited IT budgets. “It’s often about improving ROI,” Singh says. “You can save a lot on hardware costs by breaking up one physical machine into multiple VMs.”
Creating VMs can also help agencies improve usage of the servers they have. When organizations rely solely on physical machines, server capacity is typically underutilized, so the infrastructure can handle unexpected spikes in load. That’s not necessary with a hypervisor “because you can instantly shift resources to the VM that’s experiencing the load and automatically balance out utilization,” Ellis says.
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Better portability is another advantage of hypervisors, as the tech enables near-instantaneous failover in the event of an outage. That’s because in a virtual machine, the OS and applications are packaged together.
“If you have a problem with your physical server, all you have to do is copy the virtual hard drive and configuration file to another VM and press a button to turn it on,” Ellis says.
The Top Hypervisor Solutions for Agencies to Consider
Among the most popular Type 1 hypervisors are VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and the open-source virtualization software available through the Xen Project community. Top Type 2s include Oracle VM VirtualBox, VMware Workstation and Parallels Desktop.
Many agencies implement hypervisors as part of their deployment of an enterprise virtualization platform. For example, VMware’s vSphere relies on virtualization to shift data center workloads into the cloud.
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“You get the core hypervisor layer, but it also includes ops management and machine learning-based analytics capabilities,” Singh says, adding that the tools available in such platforms are meant to help IT administrators get the most out of their existing infrastructure.
“[Organizations] want to know that they’re managing their capacity to the max for the best possible return on their hardware investment,” Singh says. For agencies focused on digital transformation and app modernization, “a hypervisor solution can streamline the process.”
