Some of you may have been hearing about virtualization either on web sites, trade magazines, or from your IT department.
Well what is virtualization and why should I care? Virtualization was introduced several years ago by a couple of software companies most notably VMWare. Microsoft soon followed with their version of virtualization software in 2005. What virtualization gives you is the ability to consolidate multiple servers onto one physical machine.
One of the main benefits you get with Virtualization is cost savings. Consider an environment where you have three servers. An SQL Server, email server, and the terminal server for remote access. Each one of these servers can cost between 6 and 7K each. Now consider consolidating those servers onto a more robust server between 10 and 11K. That is a real saving of almost 10K on hardware.
Those are the hard costs, now let’s look at some of the soft costs.
With a virtualized environment you can see a reduction of IT support costs for things such as:
Software Maintenance
Disaster Recovery
Restoring previous states
Increased performance of applications
Click here for a great white paper on the benefits.
