April 20, 2009, 1:42 PM — 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. By doing this, mid-sized businesses not only experience better resource utilization but also conserves space and energy—all of which can have a significant impact on the bottom line.
Through virtualization, these businesses also have more flexibility as virtual machines can be moved and copied from one location to another much like a software file. Because virtual machines are hardware-independent, moving a virtual machine does not require an already overburdened network administrator to devote time and effort to changing device drivers, reconfiguring applications, and more. With this increased agility, organizations are better positioned to respond to changes in the business environment.
Where to Begin?
As many mid-sized businesses look to deploy virtualization solutions in their IT environment, several considerations must be examined. Perhaps the most important concern is to be sure their virtual environment is as available and secure as their physical one -- but without introducing another complex, specialized toolset to manage and control. Instead, small businesses must be able to protect a hybrid environment completely, manage it easily, and control it automatically in order to maximize the benefits that virtualization promises.
For this, businesses can leverage a growing range of data protection solutions that work the same across both physical and virtual environments. So, whether data resides on a desktop, a virtual server, a Windows file server, or even a Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server, data and systems can quickly and continuously be backed up from the same console.
A number of these tools also couple continuous data protection with more granular recovery capabilities so that everything from virtual machines, to individual files and folders can be recovered from a single up-to-date backup. This, in turn, enables mid-sized businesses to meet strict recovery time objectives (RTOs) while also reducing the backup footprint on storage resources.
To improve IT staff productivity, mid-sized businesses must also be able to see into and manage their virtual and physical environments. For example, with these capabilities integrated into the company’s backup and recovery strategy, the network administration will be able to quickly and efficiently discover unprotected physical and virtual systems and inventory and upgrade them.
In addition, organizations must also be sure their hybrid environment is recoverable even to dissimilar hardware or virtual environments in the event of a disaster or system failure while also keeping planned downtime to a minimum. To that end, organizations are advised to take advantage of a growing number of backup and recovery tools that work across heterogeneous environments, including virtual systems, and also include functionality to schedule physical to virtual (P2V) system migrations.
As these mid-sized organizations begin to feel the strain of accommodating more and more applications and data on existing servers, they are increasingly turning to virtualization. By leveraging virtualization to migrate common applications onto virtual machines, small businesses can improve hardware and resource utilization while reducing costs and increasing application service flexibility.
To ensure these hybrid environments are optimized, businesses can also implement existing backup and recovery capabilities that improve system, application, and data protection and recovery in a cost-effective and efficient way. With these tools and technologies in place, mid-sized businesses can be sure their investment in a virtualized environment delivers on its promises today and into the future.
Pat Hanavan is VP, Product Management at Symantec
