Virtualization for small businesses

Why should small businesses consider virtualization for their IT infrastructure?

A few years ago, most people didn’t know the meaning of the word virtualization, much less how it could benefit their business.  In 2006 I was a consultant working at a business in northern NJ managing their infrastructure.  We had a separate physical server for each customer that leveraged their application.  When it came time to replicate the environment to a data center for redundancy, you guessed it, we purchased an equal number of physical servers to match what was deployed at the office.  The fact is, we didn’t know enough about virtualization to make an informed decision.  Fast forward almost 5 years and things have really changed!  If an IT vendor doesn’t know about virtualization or isn’t recommending it to their customers, then the reality is, they are doing their customers a huge disservice.

What is virtualization?

In layman’s terms, virtualization, as it relates to servers (and this post), is the leveraging of a physical piece of  hardware to run multiple operating system images.

What are the benefits of virtualization?

Virtualization provides many benefits for companies of all sizes.  Some of the benefits are:

• Cost savings – The server hardware sold today is powerful.  The savings come in the ability to leverage that power to run multiple virtual servers rather than deploying a separate physical machine for each server. Capital expenditure is reduced through the ability to consolidate.
• Energy efficiency – Less physical hardware equals less electrical and cooling costs.  Better for your wallet and greener for the environment.
• Portability – In a virtualized environment, the operating system images run independent of the hardware.  So instead of a bunch of files scattered across a hard drive, the entire virtualized server is contained in a single file.  This makes it much easier to move in the event of a server failure or when it is time to replacing aging hardware.

In today’s economy, a small business is looking for any way possible to keep costs low.  We leverage VMware virtualization technologies to help our customers save money and operate more efficiently.