Server virtualization on the x86 platform has been around now for the past 10 years. But believe it or not, there are still many people out there who have yet to drink the virtual kool-aid. Why not? Good question. There are many benefits to an IT organization or business when choosing to implement a server virtualization strategy. Why just stick your big toe in the water? Jump in, the water is fine.
Here are the Hyper9 Top 9 reasons you should add server virtualization into your environment:
9. Faster Server Provisioning - You can quickly clone a gold image, master template or existing virtual machine to get a fast install and deployment up and running. And because virtual machines can be simply looked at as a file on a disk, creating a new machine can be as easy as copying a file. Think of that the next time you are racking and stacking physical machines and then spending hours on end waiting for the operating system and applications to complete their installations.
8. Reclaim Old Hardware - After you go through a server consolidation exercise in production, what do you do with the older, spare hardware? How about give it to your test and development group! Having worked in a DEV shop before, I know they'd be happy to get anything. Hand me down hardware is the story of most QA/Dev groups. And if development and test are using virtualization (which they should be!), they can squeeze even more out of these boxes. Remember, your old, outdated dual single core servers trump dev's single proc Pentium 4 machines every day of the week.
7. Reduce Hardware Vendor Lock-In - While not always a bad thing, sometimes being tied down to one particular server vendor or even one type of server can prove quite frustrating. But because server virtualization abstracts away the underlying hardware and replaces it with virtual hardware, data center managers and owners can gain a bit more flexibility when it comes to the server equipment it chooses. This can also come in handy during times of renegotiation with the hardware vendor.
6. Improve Business Continuity - Leveraging virtualization features such as live migration or vMotion, DRS and FT can help an organization survive the dreaded server downtime or give them the ability to quickly recover from unplanned outages. And let's not forget about backups. Those can be made easier as well in a virtualized world.
5. Reduce the Data Center Footprint - Consolidation with virtualization reduces the overall footprint of your data center. Less servers, less switches, less racks, etc. all translate into less data center floor space required. And let's face it, if you don't have your own data center facility, have you looked at pricing lately for co-location? If you are co-lo somewhere, have you been told yet that there is no more floor space available to your organization in that facility? Not yet? Just wait.
4. Improve Disaster Recovery - By consolidating servers down to fewer machines, you can more easily create a replication site. And since virtualization abstracts away the underlying hardware, you don't even need identical or perhaps as costly hardware for your DR facility as you might have in production.
3. Squeeze More Out of Your Hardware - In the physical world, we are typically forced to live in a "one app - one server" model. And because of that, many servers never reach full utilization, averaging somewhere between the 10-20% area of resource usage. You spent good money on that server, so why not get more use out of it? By consolidating many virtual machines onto a single physical server, you can get average resource usage comfortably at or near the 80% mark.
2. Extend the Life of Certain Applications - Be honest, you have some pretty old legacy applications still running in your environment, don't you? And it probably doesn't run on a new OS or a new piece of hardware either. And chances are good that the software author isn't even around anymore to update it, even if you wanted to. By virtualizing and encapsulating the application and its environment, you can extend its life out and get rid of that old Gen 1 Pentium machine sitting in the corner of the data center, all covered in dust... hoping it never dies.
And the number one reason to choose server virtualization in your environment... Drum roll please...
1. Go Green, Save Energy - Ok, maybe you aren't the "save the planet" T-shirt wearing kind of person. You don't have to be out there hugging trees or saving whales to make a difference. Consolidating many machines onto fewer physical servers means lowering monthly power and cooling costs in the data center. And that's saving more than one type of green!
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