It’s a pretty common occurrence among today’s contemporary
industry to have antiquated (Legacy) machines still in service. You may have a
computer that functions as an appliance for your business that drives machinery
over Serial or has a piece of software that only operates on an old, no longer
supported Operating System.
Generally, the reason businesses have these machines around
despite the rest of the network being updated on a regular basis is that such
transitions are problematic. Newer machines lack appropriate device interfaces,
necessary OS for software packages to run, set up may be laborious/cost
intensive and/or you simply never got around to it. Unfortunately, this style
of non-proactive maintenance of critical systems greatly increases your
exposure to loss. If the machine goes down and you can’t fix it, what’s your
contingency plan? How will business be impacted and for how long?
One of the easiest ways to bring these machines up to 21st
century standards without having to start over is to virtualize the machine.
Essentially, virtualization
(which we’ve discussed before for other
applications) is a computer within a computer. Aside from offering decreased
cost, easier backup, administration, maintenance, transition of systems and
less energy use it can also be used to get these legacy system roles working on
contemporary hardware. This can greatly
increase your business’s plasticity in the event of a failure and reduce the
chances of failure occurring at all.
You can essentially ‘Copy’ an old computer and put it on a
Host machine; a computer that ‘houses’ the virtual (Guest) computer. The availability
of modern software solutions such as VMWare,
VirtualBox and Microsoft’s Hyper-V
mean there’s likely a solution available to suits your specific needs. Virtualization
technology such Intel’s VT-D,
features such as USB Passthrough, the ability to emulate Serial/Parallel
commands, customizable virtual devices, etc. means that there are few
environments that this doesn’t work. However, you MUST make the evaluation and transition
while the current legacy solution still works, not after.
Of course there are some drawbacks. Generally, the
abstraction involved in virtualization also means that there’s overhead for
computations; you won’t be able to use the Host’s hardware’s performance to its
full capacity. However, the host machine is typically many times faster than
the machine you’re virtualizing for this purpose and the line between physical
and virtual is diminishing at an exponential rate. There are also some
instances such as the need for proprietary device/driver support that this
solution won’t work due a limitation of hardware/software compatibility or
other limitation.
Employing the use of Virtualization if it fits the bill can
save money and a lot of future headaches. Be sure to let us know if you’d like
to discuss its applicability to your environment.
