Top Benefits
of Sever Virtualization
Server virtualization is an innovation this has been around for a
number of years. In the past year there
are two words that are heard daily in the IT industry and they are
virtualization and cloud. Virtualization
allows you to take several physical servers that are each running on its on
hardware and consolidate them onto one physical piece of hardware. This creates
several benefits for companies and IT departments. Microsoft and VMware are the two major companies
that offer this technology.
There are several benefits to virtualizing your IT environment. Most
of the world is talking about saving energy and going green and with
virtualization you will be reducing your energy costs and reducing the amount
of hardware you currently use. IT
networks are the backbone of business and without them they cannot operate so
they require 100% uptime and virtualization allows for fast server provisioning
for new servers or for a server that has gone offline. By decreasing the number of physical servers
you have you can use older servers as a disaster recovery plan. Using the old servers at an off-site location
and having the new servers replicate to them will ensure 100% uptime that companies
require. All IT departments overs the
years have been forced to be locked into one hardware vendor and changing was
difficult, virtualization changes this because it not vendor specific. If you have a physical server running on Dell
hardware and you want to virtualize it onto an HP server hardware this would
not be an issue. Isolating applications
onto one server has been a practice used by IT departments which has caused the
need for additional servers that were not being utilized to their fullest
potential. Virtualization will eliminate
this practice and reduce hardware costs. Most companies have placed their servers
off-site in their own datacenter or with a company that manages datacenter
operations. Due to the decrease in
servers through virtualization companies will need less space in a datacenter
so the cost of running or renting will go down.
There are several implications to virtualization that managers
need to be aware of. With new
technology comes a need for highly skilled employees with virtualization
skills. Management will need to include
training in its virtualization roadmap.
Companies are always looking for areas to cut costs and virtualization
offers saving in hardware, energy, IT management time, and datacenter
costs. These saving for a midsize to
large companies are huge. Small
companies do not have the number of servers larger companies have so their
savings will not be as big as the large companies but that does not mean they
do not need to virtualize. The next big
step IT will face is migrating to the cloud as it matures and implementing
virtualization in their environment will put them in an excellent position to
migrate to the cloud in the future.
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