Virtualization: Saving Money through Consolidation

December 27, 2010

Given the current economic landscape, it is as important as ever that IT departments do their best to save money. In the past, setting up virtual environments was complicated and required specialized knowledge, but development of the technology has introduced easier installation and management to the marketplace.

Virtualization allows for the consolidation of servers by running multiple separate server instances on one physical server. Current virtualization technology also offers much in the way of redundancy, load balancing, and recovery from hardware failures.

Virtualization helps IT departments by providing:

• Consolidation - It is not uncommon to have a business critical application that is incompatible with other applications and requires its own server. In the past, this would have required both an expensive physical server and having to pay to house the server. With virtualization, one physical server can run several virtual machines separately from one another. This allows that application to have its own server without actually taking up a whole physical server.
• Redundancy and load balancing - It is possible to run a virtual server on different physical servers, moving the server back and forth between hosts as events warrant (sometimes not even dropping any network traffic at all). If a physical server was to become unavailable due to hardware failure, the virtual machines that were running on that server could automatically or manually be moved to another host server by utilizing management tools. Another benefit of virtual servers is that they do not require nearly as much time to start up as physical servers because the power-on-self-test phase is essentially skipped.

YJT has experience setting up virtualization environments for clients of various sizes, from just one or two servers for a test environment to all physical servers. While the dominant technology remains VMWare, Citrix's XenCenter and Microsoft's Virtual PC are also available as virtualization technologies, and YJT has experience with all three.