Virtualization has been around for more than a decade and the multi-faceted advantages offered by virtualization are attainable even if you run a small business. However current trend suggests that SMB’s need virtualization more than ever to gain a competitive advantage in the market. The few reasons as to why small businesses need virtualization are as follows:
- The traditional and most compelling reason for implementing server-side virtualization is to make more efficient use of computing resources with regards to processor cycles and RAM. Beyond savings in energy and cooling costs, small and mid-sized businesses can cut their capital expenses as fewer physical servers are purchased to replace a larger number of ageing machines as they are decommissioned.Implementing server virtualization at its simplest revolves around squeezing in as many virtual machines (VMs) as possible within physical server hosts. As you become more comfortable working with VMs, you can adopt a more streamlined approach and a more an appliance-like attitude towards VMs. You can accomplish this by creating VMs based on the logical services they provide as opposed to simply mirroring physical servers with virtual ones.
- Disaster recovery (or DR) revolves around being able to reinstate things to a state of normalcy after a disaster. As you can imagine, backing up a fully virtualized infrastructure by making copies of VM files images is a far easier process than trying to do the same with disparate hardware servers.Moreover, it takes just a fraction of the original hardware equipment to host an entire infrastructure using virtualization. What this means for cash-strapped small and mid-sized business is that you could afford to buy a small number of servers to be housed at an alternative location. In the event of a disaster, these servers could then be relocated as necessary, loaded with the latest VMs and put into action faster than the lead times offered by most IT vendors.
- Business continuity is different from disaster recovery in that the goal is achieving zero or a minimum amount of interruption to business operations. Given that the most common source of failure in the data center is probably the failure of server hardware, this is where a server virtualization feature called live migration helps preserve business continuity by eliminating the need for downtime.
- If your company does any software development work, virtualization gives your small businesses the opportunity to lower costs by eliminating the need to fork out money for additional hardware. Mid-sized businesses benefit, too, as development teams save time by not having to endure the lengthy process of requisitioning new servers. Moreover, it is a trivial matter to setup a test rig with the appropriate VMs to test various builds of an application on all supported platforms.
- Virtualization makes it a trivial task to test out new software updates or security patches prior to their deployment on live systems. Moreover, internal development teams will also benefit from testing N-Tier applications on a virtualized replica of the current infrastructure to test for problems arising from unanticipated interactions between the various components.
- Keeping in mind the various factors involved, it is imperative that SMB’s should ally with a solutions provider who is affordable, has high quality products and offers seamless service and We, at Vembu are confident of offering all of them with extreme ease.
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