Coordinating a team is difficult enough, so doing it when its members are working from different parts of the world can sound nearly impossible. Fortunately for you, this is what some people already do, and we have some tips to help you do it yourself.

Think globally

In order to get things done on a smaller scale, you need to think on a larger first. It is important for you to draw yourself a picture of what needs to be done with all that separate work.

Give the members of your team a common goal

The picture you end up with will probably be the goal of your whole operation. You will need to present it to the members of your team so that they know why they are doing their jobs in the first place.

Get to know your team

Before you go any further, you will have to find out what kind of people work for you. How flexible they are, how resourceful, and whether any one of them has any quirks that might help or slow down the whole operation.

Define the roles

Taking the goal into consideration, make a list of all the jobs that need to be done. Then pair the jobs with the people that are best suited for it.

Plan the operation

One of the things that are crucial for successful coordination of the teamwork is planning. If you manage to plan your tasks well enough, there will be less need for communicating in general.

Communicate with your team

Present your goal and strategy to the members of your team even before you start the operation. This is especially important when it comes to long-distance cooperation. Keep communicating regularly during the length of the job as well.

Find the right tools for communication and organization

There are plenty of online organizational tools, and even more of those specifically designed for communication. Some of the most popular include Google spreadsheets and Skype, but even if these don’t work for you, you will be able to find something better suited. And if in any moment you start feeling overwhelmed, you can ask help to an events agency in Milan.

Server virtualization optimizes the physical resources available and facilitate management and use of the server. More in detail, here are the main advantages of virtualization:

• reduction of physical servers: the same hardware can allow the execution of multiple virtual machines with the advantage of reducing energy consumption, heat generated, risk of hardware failures, number of rack cabinets and space needed to house all the servers
• server consolidation: it is estimated that, on average, a modern server is used only by 15 %to 20% of its maximum power. It is therefore reasonable that it can house 3 or 4 virtual machines without any performance problem
• hardware independence: the software, and in particular the operating system, is closely tied to the underlying hardware. So, if for some reason, a server installation must be moved or copied on another machine, you will may need to take into account some hardware compatibility problems. Since virtualization create layers of abstraction in an operating system, there are no problem due to physical hardware.
• stronger adaptability: virtual server can easily change based on a company’s priorities and needs. Virtualization allows to allocate the virtual hardware resources in a much faster and more flexible way

On the other hand virtualization is not problem-free. Here are main troubles:

• overhead: each virtualization decrease the overall performance of the physical server, such as time of disk access, memory access and so on. Some critical applications may be affected by the environment of the overhead introduced by virtualization;
• not all the hardware may be virtualizzabile, depending on the product used. Most trouble can be found on serial and parallel ports, USB devices, Bluetooth interfaces, graphics hardware acceleration and so on .

Virtual Machines are so far the best way to make experiments on our computer, such as installing new software, without any risk to compromise the main OS. One of the best virtualization software out there is VMware Player, which is free for personal use (for commercial use there is the “Plus” version which costs £ 75.95).

How can we use this software and in which way it can be useful? First of all, we need to download it (it is available both for Windows and Linux). Currently the latest version is 6.0.1. Once the download has been finished and the software has been installed, is possible to launch the program and create a New Virtual Machine.

The system will ask for a media source to proceed with the installation. We can provide a CD, a DVD or an ISO image. In few steps the process is completed and we have at our entire disposal a brand new virtual machine for tests or just to try out new OS (i.e. the latest Ubuntu release or a new Linux distro we never tried before).

During installation the process will ask how many space we want to reserve for the virtual machines. It depends what we need the virtual machine for. If it’s just to try it, do not go over 30Gb, otherwise we can reserve more space.

VMware Player behaves like a physical pc, then we can proceed with software installation, surfing the internet and so on. Please be aware that, as it’s a virtual OS, it can be a bit more limited than real OS, so probably more heavier operations won’t perform so good than they would do on a real PC.