In the last few years, Server Virtualization has taken off.  Many business people are confused by exactly what Sever Virtualization means, but to IT people, it has been a huge benefit.  It’s also a huge benefit to business in general, but often under appreciated.

What is it and why is it such a big deal? Server Virtualization is basically a technology that allows traditional servers (hardware + operating system + applications) to be “encapsulated” and run in conjunction with other encapsulated servers on common hardware.

Why is this a big thing? Well, due to Moore’s Law, hardware (and specifically server hardware) has increased in capacity and performance far faster than the software required for most business applications.  This results in most traditional hardware servers (with the increased performance capacity) being under-utilized, with performance utilization in the 10-20% or below range. Meanwhile, they are still consuming valuable power and cooling assets and taking up valuable rack space, not to mention capital costs for the hardware.  Why can’t you just combine various applications on the same server? Well, due to the various software requirements of applications, many vendors won’t support or certify performance or operations when co-mingled with other non-certified applications.  The result is that, de-facto, each application must be installed on it’s own server, alone.  The result it that many CPU cycles are wasted.

Server Virtualization technology allows several “virtual” servers to be executed on common hardware, using common hardware resources, and “time-sliced” in such a way that each server thinks that it’s on its’ own hardware, but in reality the CPU cycles are combined, resulting in a much higher utilization for the physical hardware.  Using a single high-performance hardware, you can host several (sometimes up to 50-100) virtual servers. This results in many fewer actual hardware servers, each running at a much higher utilization and using the available resources much more efficiently.

I have found that, even in very small businesses, server virtualization has huge benefits, and many additional uses can be realized with no (or very limited) additional hardware purchase, which is high on the minds of SMB owners.  These include:
– Backup and Recovery is easier and more consistent
– It’s easy to try out new applications without affecting production systems
– Disaster Recovery is possible since everything is encapsulated and fairly easily transportable to different hardware
– Remote management is easier (note: I’ve even got a failed server up and running again with my iPad at 35,000 feet on an airplane)
– Hardware management is simplified and hardware reboots are infrequent

Since the existing virtualization technology “encapsulates” the virtual server into a set of very few files, it makes the virtual servers much more portable and robust.  Backups of servers are accomplished by backing up as few a eight files (configuration, logs, memory, and virtual disks) rather than a whole machine of thousands on separate files.  These are self-contained, and can be restored to similar (but not identical) hardware at a moment’s notice.

I have “guinea-pigged” the technology on my own business systems for some time now, and subsequently I have converted most of my small business customers to Server Virtualization, and that has resulted in improved relaibility and efficiency for the customer, and much less headache in manageability for me.

The technology, while fairly mature in the past few years, has become rock solid, with very little down time and outages.  If there is a problem with the underlying hardware, recovery is much faster to alternative assets due to the abstraction layer of the physical hardware.

It’s a win-win for both the business and the IT contractor, and I encourage you to consider and embrace it!