The Benefits of Virtualization
One of the primary things that keep businesses from having state-of-the-art technology is the same problem that plagues almost everyone – lack of money. Backing up production servers that keep your business running is very expensive and when your servers fail, the time it takes your IT team to repair it is frustrating. The benefits of virtualization can help resolve these issues and save you money. Having two or three physical servers takes up a lot of space and uses a large amount of electricity causing your electric bill to sky rocket. Virtualization allows you to have one physical server that can host all of your applications, and easily backup and restore data in case anything should happen to it.
For example, let’s say you spend a certain amount of money to buy three new servers. One to host your network, another to store your database of customers and inventory, and a third to allow your employees remote access from home or out in the field. Not only does the implementation of all this hardware get expensive very quickly, but it creates multiple points of failure that can severely impact your business.
Now, take all those servers and host them in one managed, virtualized environment. Three big, bulky, power-hungry servers become one, which is cared for remotely by your technology support team. Not only is the cost of hardware lower, but your electric bill goes down as well. Since they can be duplicated as a flat file with no hardware dependencies, the virtual servers can be backed up and restored in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. Not only can virtualization save you money now, it can prevent you from losing more money in the future.
Virtualized environments do come with potential hazards. For instance, if you have one server that hosts three virtual machines and the host server loses power or connectivity to the network; you can lose the ability to connect to everything on it. Also, virtual operating systems can sometimes be difficult to troubleshoot since they do not conform to the hardware standards of traditional computers.
Overall, a properly designed and implemented virtual server environment can be vastly beneficial to any medium or large sized business. The pros outweigh the cons, to turn a phrase, and it’s something any business owner should consider.
