Small and medium businesses are gradually implementing the concept of virtualization over the recent years. A SMB faces more challenges than a large enterprise due to its size, budget, staffing, and resource constraints. Out of these, major stumbling block factors for these SMBs are the budget and resource utilities that lead to heavy impediments for their exponential growth. If the SMBs can overcome this factor at their growing stage, they will be able to allocate more resources according to their staffing size at lower costs.
Let’s discuss about the following factors that justifies the need for virtualization:
Energy management:
By consolidating the hardware, the number of servers can be reduced as much as possible. The power consumption for every server consumed is high and thus by consolidating it, we can save power in order to utilize it for other resources. In other words, it’s economical to save power by virtualizing the servers.
Compromising the cost of downtime:
The down time cost associated with SMBs can create a huge loss of thousands of dollars on an average per hour. However, due to catastrophic reasons if your server is destroyed, the downtime will be from one to two weeks and you will be accountable for a monstrous loss. Not only that, the recovery procedure will again want you to shell out more money to regain normalcy.
Hardware and operating costs:
Having too many physical servers in a SMB will lead to requiring more room and maintenance. We can instead consolidate those servers and operate them efficiently at a lower cost by virtualizing these servers. By virtualizing these servers, companies can cut down their operating cost to a greater extent. Not only that, they will be effectively able to allocate more resources and create room to accommodate more staffing. In case a disaster occurs, they can simply recover the backed up data.
Availability of resources:
The software applications that are to be used by n number of users can be made easily available through virtualization. By virtualizing these softwares, each terminal in an organisation doesn’t need to have the softwares and other supporting applications installed separately.
Uninterrupted business continuity:
Whenever a server hardware fails, the data has to be backed up instantly with a minimal or near to zero downtime. By virtualizing this server the data will be synchronized to a target VM, and the physical server host doesn’t have to be turned off during a live migration, thus achieving a negligible downtime. As I’ve mentioned earlier, since a SMB cannot afford to a loss of significant data during a disaster or a downtime, virtualisation is the best practice to have any data undisturbed.
Disaster recovery plans:
After a disaster has occurred, the time to come back to a normal state totally up and running again in order to avoid downtime and recover all the data as soon as possible can be done possibly by disaster recovery plans. You can restore your backup server in no time to sometimes prevent going out of business or losing ample customers during a mass destruction. Server restoration can be done exponentially faster by reducing the cost of downtime, loss of productivity and sales.
Factors to be kept in mind before going for virtualization:
Finance and investment: Though virtualisation gains profit to your business in the future, you may need to rethink about the cost of investment that you’re gonna put upfront, which may go beyond your expectations. Depending upon your company’s requirements, you will need hardware and softwares to be implemented for virtualization.
How do I choose?
There are a handful of virtualization technologies available and you need to do more research to find the right technology suitable according to your business needs. Choose the right technology available to do more that enough for your business and don’t overspend on things that you don’t even require for your business. Be more informative and choosy about the hypervisors that you choose to support your hardware platforms.
Software licensing: Buying a software license not only leads to overspending, but it does sometimes hassles you with the complexity of buying insufficient or wrong licenses that ends up with critical problems to both the user and the company. You may even get into legal troubles that disturbs your company’s reputation which in turn leads to devastation of the organisation. There are some license agreements that doesn’t support contract for virtualization. So check all the license agreements of the softwares before virtualizing.
Maintenance: It is very much important to maintain a virtual server to be consistently running in a proper condition. You need to involve more staffing and train them to gain knowledge as of how to handle and maintain a virtual environment. Since maintaining a virtual server is more different from maintaining a physical server, training is required to handle them. Training involves additional expenditure in a SMB; however an improper virtualisation may end up bringing severe disasters to your company if proper care is not taken.
Learning and Knowledge:
To implement a virtualization concept, you will first need to know about it, You can gain sufficient knowledge by reading books, websites, attending seminars, listening to webinars, etc.
You can also know about Vembu products by going through our blogs, recent posts, webinars etc that will help you to know about virtualization in depth.
Vembu Backup Solutions:
Vembu is providing Backup and Disaster Recovery options through different software options as per the customer needs through Vembu BDR Suite.
- Vembu VMBackup : Vembu VMBackup is backup and disaster recovery solution for the virtualized data centres. It supports both the VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.
- Vembu ImageBackup : Vembu ImageBackup is a disk image based backup and recovery software for the Windows Physical Servers, Desktops and Laptops.
- Vembu NetworkBackup : Vembu NetworkBackup is a backup software to backup your desktops/laptops, file servers, applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, etc.
- Vembu OnlineBackup : Vembu OnlineBackup is a Cloud Backup Solution to backup your files and applications directly to Vembu Cloud.
- Vembu SaaSBackup : Vembu SaaSBackup is a backup and recovery software for SaaS Applications (Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps).
Interested in trying Vembu BDR suite?, Try Now on a 30-days free trial: https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-bdr-suite-download/
Got questions? Email us at: vembu-support@vembu.com for answers.
Follow our Twitter and Facebook feeds for new releases, updates, insightful posts and more.
