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By Walter Scott
Virtualization has long been the domain of large enterprises. Beginning with time-sharing technology on massive mainframes, virtualization required large data centers and larger IT budgets. The advent of high-performance workstations and servers based on Windows, Linux and similar technologies brought the benefits of virtualization to small- and mid-size businesses that might have only a limited IT staff and an even more limited budget.
Today, virtual operating systems from companies such as Microsoft, VMware, SWsoft and XenSource allow companies of all size to take advantage of hardware that would have made yesterday’s IT managers salivate in envy. Multicore processors, inexpensive system memory and commodity-priced massive disk drives are putting the disk farms and mainframes of years ago into a small chassis. The result: technology that once was the province of multinational companies can now be used by small- and mid-sized businesses as well — assuming they have the technological wherewithal to implement these capabilities.
For example, instead of being confined to a single operating system on each physical computer, companies can leverage virtual server technology to deploy multiple environments on the same box. Companies can use virtual servers to eliminate costs of managing and upgrading legacy hardware by migrating older applications onto virtual machines running on new, reliable hardware. They can also consolidate low-use departmental servers onto a single physical server to decrease management complexity.
In order for an SMB to take advantage of virtualization, there are several technological issues that need to be understood and exploited. Once harnessed, a world of opportunity exits.
• Deploying a Server: Migration from physical to virtual, virtual to physical, virtual to virtual and physical to physical.
• Hardware and Software Support: Support for multiple hardware platforms and operating systems, including both 32- and 64-bit servers as well as VMware, Microsoft, XenSource and Parallels virtual environments.
• Customizing the Migration Process: Migrate an entire system or specific files to another server.
• Working with Data: Migrating either live data or data at rest with either an on-line or off-line migration with minimal disruption.
• Disaster Recovery: Take a backup image and migrate that to a new server for historic data retrieval purposes.
Sound impossible for an SMB with only limited IT capabilities? It isn’t. It really is based on the axiom: Use the right tool for the job.
Deploying a Server
In an SMB, deploying a server generally requires building the system from scratch, including installing the operating system and applications, configuring the applications and then configuring the network. This is a time- and personnel-intensive task. Depending on the server being built, it could take literally days to build, test, configure, test, debug, test and deploy. Then, when you build another system, you start all over.
It would be a lot more efficient to build a single system, and then deploy it again and again. In a virtual environment, this could mean designing a system in the IT lab and then deploying it to virtual servers at a hosting company or to remote systems. But how do you ensure that the system you built in one location actually work in another?
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