You may be tired of hearing about virtualization and Cloud computing but don’t let all of the buzz drown out the real value of breaking out of the server bloat/disposable refresh cycle.  The fact remains that virtualization can save a lot of money and management resources with physical to virtual machine conversion numbers in the range of eight to one for virtualization projects.  With reductions in hardware costs, power consumption and required management, it’s foolish not to consider it for your company, particularly considering the fact that the horsepower required to virtualize is not that big a jump from the server you were likely buying anyway.  Not convinced that virtualization is the way to go?  Read on grasshopper:

1) Virtualization reduces the number of physical servers and energy consumption
This one is the best known benefit.  Virtualizing means many servers live inside the physical box and fewer boxes mean less power.

2) A server refresh with virtualzation reduces your total server acquisition and ownership costs
With virtualization, hardware savings not only happens right out of the gate with less physical servers required,  it also ensures that your  hardware refresh life-cycle is much easier to implement.  Since your server workload is separate from the physical hardware, you can refresh your hardware without the headache of migrating an operating system and applications to a new piece of hardware.

3) Using virtualization increases server utilization
Better utilization of investment. If you think about how much computing power a hardware server has and how much you actually use, there’s a lot of waste. I usually poll the audience when I present on virtualization, and people typically estimate that they are utilizing 10 percent or less of the actual power of their servers. Server virtualization allows you to capture the lost utilization.

4) Data Recovery and Portability
When running virtual, your “server” is now just a file on a disk. The hardware just becomes the processor and RAM to run the virtual server. If you replicate the virtual servers, you can bring up your production environment anywhere; not a copy of your production environment, but your actual production environment.  With server virtualization, you can snapshot a server at a point in time before making changes. If the changes have a negative impact on the environment, you can quickly and easily roll back to the snapshot.

5) Price
Virtualized servers often aren’t any more expensive than non-virtualized servers.  Even better, most major vendors now have free offerings for basic server virtualization. For example, VMware’s ESXi, Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server, and Citrix’s XenServer are all free.

We highly recommend that on your next technology refresh cycle, consider breaking out of the disposable system trap in which hardware vendors like to place you. There is no reason why your next refresh should not include server consolidation, virtualization or both.   Want to Learn More?  Request a Complimentary VirtualGreen Office Technology Audit today.  Our VirtualGreen Office Assessment provides you with a current snapshop, roadmap and ROI rolled into an Easy-to-GreenIT Executive Summary with clearly defines action items to take your network and business to the next level.