Virtualization for the Mid-Sized Business

Virtualization started out decades ago as a way to make better use of large, expensive, mainframe computers. While the IT landscape has changed dramatically since then, virtualization continues to be adopted by businesses that are looking to optimize the use of their existing server resources and, in turn, lower IT costs.

The benefits of virtualization extend to mid-sized businesses as well. With more and more applications and data to protect and manage, these growing companies are implementing virtualization to make better use of hardware, lower costs, and increase business agility.

A growing number of virtualization solutions are emerging that target mid-sized businesses. Microsoft recently released its Hyper-V solution, its first entry into the virtualization market, while virtualization pioneer VMware introduced its new ESXi 3.5 for small businesses. These offerings are currently available as free downloads.

Before implementing server virtualization, small businesses must understand what this technology does and then assess their own environment. Are common applications running on a variety of different servers in the organization? Is the organization dealing with more and more applications? Do many of these applications support virtualization? Is the increase in applications straining current server capacity?

What Is It?
Growing businesses must choose their investments wisely in today’s economic climate. Consequently, before implementing a promising technology such as virtualization, it is important for these organizations to understand how it works.

The most popular virtualization solutions today are based on a hypervisor. A hypervisor is a layer of software that decouples the physical hardware from the operating system so that multiple operating systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer. VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenSource are hypervisor-based.

In many ways, a virtual machine acts like a physical computer by running its own operating systems and applications. Like its physical counterparts, the virtual machine has its own CPU, RAM, hard disk, and network interface card—but in virtual form (that is, software).

The beauty of virtualization is that to an operating system or an application, a virtual machine looks just like a physical machine. In reality, however, the virtual machine has no hardware components; it is made up entirely of software. This means a user can run on a virtual machine nearly any software they would run on a physical machine.

Why Adopt Virtualization?
Virtualization enables a business to do more with less. It removes the traditional one-to-one application-to-server ratio and allows the organization to run multiple applications on a single physical piece of hardware.

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