Virtualization for the rest of us

As the virtualization wave washes over datacenter after datacenter, it almost seems that small businesses have been left high and dry. And with licenses for enterprise-grade server virtualization solutions costing tens of thousands of dollars, who could fault a business with only five or six servers for taking a pass?

But nestled among the high-class virtualization tools are plenty of low-cost and even free solutions that fit right in with small-business needs. Tools like VMware Server, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and open source Xen don't include the high-availability, load balancing, or virtual server migration features needed in large-scale environments. But even without these fancy features, they can make a big difference in the small business's IT budget.

Simply by moving your servers into virtual machines, you make them easy to copy, move, and consolidate on shared hardware. Because all the virtualization solutions support snapshots, you can easily reset a virtual server to a previous version, should you need to roll back undesirable changes such as a malware infection or an update gone wrong. In the event of a hardware failure, you can quickly spin up your virtual server on backup hardware. In other words, virtualization offers small shops the same sorts of benefits it offers large data centers, even if automation isn't part of the bargain.

[ See the Test Center reviews of Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, VMware Infrastructure 3 with ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, and Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop. ]

A six-server scenario

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