Considering a server virtualization strategy for your small business?
There are many benefits to an organization or business when choosing to implement a server virtualization strategy.
Here are five reasons why you should virtualize your business.
5. Increase uptime
Most server virtualization platforms now offer a number of advanced features that just aren’t found on physical servers, which helps with business continuity and increased uptime. Though the vendor feature names may be different, they usually offer capabilities such as live migration, storage migration, fault tolerance, high availability, and distributed resource scheduling. These technologies keep virtual machines chugging along or give them the ability to quickly recover from unplanned outages. The ability to quickly and easily move a virtual machine from one server to another is perhaps one of the greatest single benefits of virtualization with far-reaching uses. As the technology continues to mature to the point where it can do long-distance migrations, such as being able to move a virtual machine from one data center to another no matter the network latency involved, the virtual world will become that much more in demand.
4. Improve disaster recovery
Having a server virtualization strategy offers an organization three important components when it comes to building out a disaster recovery solution. The first is its hardware abstraction capability. By removing the dependency on a particular hardware vendor or server model, a disaster recovery site no longer needs to keep identical hardware on hand to match the production environment, and IT can save money by buying cheaper hardware in the DR site since it rarely gets used. Second, by consolidating servers down to fewer physical machines in production, an organization can more easily create an affordable replication site. And third, most enterprise server virtualization platforms have software that can help automate the failover when a disaster does strike. The same software usually provides a way to test a disaster recovery failover as well. Imagine being able to actually test and see your failover plan work in reality, rather than hoping and praying that it will work if and when the time comes.
3. Isolate applications
In the physical world, data centers typically moved to a “one app/one server” model in order to isolate applications. But this caused physical server sprawl, increased costs, and underutilized servers. Having a server virtualization strategy provides application isolation and removes application compatibility issues by consolidating many of these virtual machines across far fewer physical servers. This also cuts down on server waste by more fully utilizing the physical server resources and by provisioning virtual machines with the exact amount of CPU, memory, and storage resources that it needs.
2. Extend the life of older applications
Let’s be honest — you probably have old legacy applications still running in your environment. These applications probably fit into one or more of these categories: It doesn’t run on a modern operating system, it may not run on newer hardware, your IT team is afraid to touch it, and chances are good that the person or company who created it is no longer around to update it. By virtualizing and encapsulating the application and its environment, you can extend its life, maintain uptime, and finally get rid of that old Pentium machine hidden in the corner of the data center. You know the one, it’s all covered in dust with fingerprints from administrators long gone and names forgotten.
1. Help move things to the cloud
As much as you think you’ve been talked to death about virtualizing your environment, that probably doesn’t even compare to the number of times that you’ve had someone talk to you about joining “the cloud.” The good news here is that by virtualizing your servers and abstracting away the underlying hardware, you are preparing yourself for a move into the cloud. The first step may be to move from a simple virtualized data center to a private cloud. But as the public cloud matures and the technology around it advances, you become more comfortable with the thought of moving data out of your data center and into a cloud hosting facility, you will have had a head start in getting there. The journey along the way will have better prepared you and the organization.
(Adapted from a recent InfoWorld Article)
If you are interested in learning more about a server virtualization strategy for your business give us a call at 856.282.1131 or email us at sales@radius180.com.
