How to Know if Virtualization Makes Sense for Your Business
Posted by Crystal Nichols on Mon, Feb 22, 2010 @ 07:00 AM
Virtualization is, as you’re already aware, one of the hottest trends right now in business. Virtualization is designed to speed up routine IT administrative tasks, increase the availability of applications, be able to respond immediately to the changing needs of a business, provide data security and backup, and even promote business continuity and disaster recovery. You’ll hear all of these things from VMware, one of the leading vendors of virtualization products.
If you listen to the hype, you’ll assume that any business can benefit from virtualization.
On the other side of the spectrum you have Dell. Dell, of course, doesn’t deal in virtualization products. According to Dell, it’s often not worth it for businesses to invest in virtualization.
So, who’s right?
Well, to some degree, they both are. There are some cases in which virtualization makes sense, and some in which it doesn’t.
The Benefits of Virtualization for Your Business
Virtualizations allows your business to reduce the time your IT staff spend on basic administrative tasks, including things like handling server workloads and adding new employees. It saves time in developing and launching new applications, and it helps your IT department become more responsive to business needs. Virtualization accomplishes all of this by reducing the amount of hardware that has to be maintained and by consolidating services in such a way as to only need to handle certain tasks once. Create an account for a new employee and it can be propagated across the enterprise, for example.
The main reason that any business chooses virtualization, however, is to improve their server utilization. They want to make more effective use of their servers, and they want to either reduce the number of servers in their environment or at least contain the number where it is today.
When Virtualization Doesn’t Make Sense
However, not every environment needs improvements in these areas. For example, if you have five servers in your business and they’re all running at less than 50% capacity and running smoothly, you probably don’t need to invest in virtualization. You’re dealing with finite numbers. You’re probably not dealing with a huge IT staff, either.
In fact, most small businesses have fewer than five or six servers at the most. We’re not running severely intensive applications, or ones that require high amounts of storage capacity or CPU capacity.
While it’s not a hard and fast rule, a company with less than 100 employees isn’t probably likely to see to much benefit from virtualization.
When to Virtualize Your Servers
This article outlines five steps you should take to determine when to virtualize your servers. There are a number of server virtualization solutions available today. However, this article isn’t about which solution to choose. Many virtualization questions are “solution agnostic,”and the question of “when” to virtualize your servers is one of them.
Click here to download the article.