Virtualization Enters the SMB World

By: Saroj Agrawal

MBA-IT

Indian Institute of Information Technology - Allahabad

Virtualization is the latest buzzword steamrolling across the IT landscape, influencing every computer room in its path. Everyone is doing it, everybody needs it, say the vendors. Whether the virtualization really adds up any value to the small business, is a big question.  The answer to this question varies from company to company. For those with more substantial computing needs, who seem to have way too many servers or skyrocketing IT costs, virtualization may offer some relief. Small sized companies having IT teams of one to four people or some firms with 60 or fewer employees often don't have the level of sophistication required to make virtualization pay. In such enterprises and environments, the benefit of virtualization would be marginal at best. Small firms in whether in financial services, law or other sectors sometimes have both significant IT requirements, the budget and the staff required to make virtualization pay big dividends.

What does the V Word mean?

Virtualization in its simple terms is not as easy as it sounds. So what does the V word mean, is again a question? Virtualization enables one server or computer to act as many servers or computers. We often keep our important programs on separate servers so that if one application or server fails, the other applications aren't affected, instead virtualization software lets you run many applications on the same server. In such a condition, we actually have one server sitting on the floor, but it acts as though it were several servers. Virtualization software will actually enable that server to be split up into different partitions.

Let us take an example; one server can be made to act as three virtual servers, where each virtual server is running an application (e.g., file server, Web server, and e-mail server). Here each virtual server is expected to acts completely independently from one another. Therefore if in case either of one crashes, the others are not affected. The result will be that we will have to buy only one server and pay for its power consumption. Here we get the benefit of three servers for the cost of one. Virtualization in one way or other is making an environment portable. Meaning that the software can be easily relocated to a larger or smaller machine or even moved from one operating system to another. This can be accomplished by splitting one physical server into numerous virtual servers or virtual machines (VM). Each virtual machine hosts a specific application or set of software. Since everything is virtual, it is easy to move the VMs around and make changes in the IT environment.

Some small businesses are incorporating on the virtualization journey as a way to simplify disaster recovery. Typically, when the SME’s went through their first disaster and in that case recovering their systems was a nightmare. To find the right back up tapes, to hook them up to new hardware, and to find all sorts problems, like not having a record of their software licenses and also not being able to find the original CDs for their operating systems and programs. They need to go through the laborious task of reinstalling and re-configuring everything and making it work on the new hardware and then figuring out how to get the data from the tapes back into the systems. This process is time consuming and complex and can take many days if you're not familiar with it. Here comes the benefit of Virtualization, which makes it relatively easy to capture everything onto a single system image, and that makes recovery a snap.

Blossoming Trend

There is no doubt that virtualization has become a buzzword and is catching on like wildfire. Most of the large and midsize firm is already doing it extensively, and now it has come the time when small enterprise could incorporate the virtualization into their business strata. Virtual Machine is adding a whole new layer of administration to IT. The companies that are still incorporating internal networking or hooking up servers to storage arrays, virtualization is going to mean the addition of a highly paid specialist into the fold. So virtualization becomes a must-have technology for many smaller organizations.

A very good reason to integrate virtualization into the business is to improve the utilization rate of hardware, which means how much processing power your server uses to run the application. For example many companies buy a server for every application they run. But we can end up with dozens of servers on the floor, most of which are very poorly utilized. Here low utilization means computers aren't being used to their limits, to the limits they could be used and that represents an awful lot of inefficiency. People are often shocked to find that many servers are running at utilization levels of less than 12 percent. However, since 9/11, the tide has been turning and the ongoing trend is to maximize utilization rates. The server virtualization is certainly playing a big part in solving this problem. This definitely brings many other advantages to the IT world. One advantage could be that the servers can now be deployed faster. Instead of taking hours or days, it can be done with a virtual machine within the hour. Other advantages include a reduction in the amount of space required for computers. This in turn is leading to lower costs for ventilation, electricity and cooling. Of course, each vendor advocates its own virtualization schemes, and the various approaches can be quite confusing.

VMware

VMware has become now the darling of the marketplace. Every company of any size, whether small or mid-sized, is engaged in some form of VMware deployment. VMware ESX Server is software based virtualization solution that facilitates hardware sharing. It makes it possible to have a powerful processor shared by multiple virtual machines behaving as though they were completely separate servers. Microsoft Windows Virtual Server Windows Virtual Server (WVS) is also software-based, and like VMware, it lets you share hardware resources such as memory and CPUs.

Virtualization in the Real World

How one small business benefits from virtualization? There may be several physical servers running VMware. Each physical server represents 15 to 20 virtual machines. The cost of purchasing physical servers would have easily run over hundred thousand dollars. VMware technology allows avoiding that expense.  Other benefits, include being able to set up a new server in less than five minutes. Such a task would have taken many hours previously. If the business is coping fine without high-level computing expertise, it's probably safe to give virtualization a pass.