All CFOs would love to save money. And server virtualization is the way to help your business save valuable money. Why?
For one thing, instead of having to spend money to purchase additional hardware servers for each of your processes, you can consolidate all these physical servers into just one dedicated server. Server virtualization is not a new technology. It has been around for awhile, but it is rather surprising that many MIS managers are only waking up to its implication for the bottomline.
Take for example a typical scenario in a large manufacturing concern. The marketing department, the design department and the administrative department each want to have their own website hosting. For the marketing department, it could be a website they want to set up to display their latest promotional brochures and business networking information. For the design department, they might require a server to store large AUTOCAD drawings and for the administrative department, they might simply require a server to handle an online database that employees of the company can log in and communicate with the company.
In a typical situation, this large manufacturing concern would have 3 separate budgets for each of these departments to purchase their own server/solution. And the MIS department might be roped in to help maintain all 3 disparate solutions provided by 3 different vendors.
On the other hand, a company can consolidate their requirements by having all three sites hosted on a single dedicated server, virtualized. Commonly available in the market, would be solutions provided by VMware, Microsoft (Hyper-V), Parallels (Virtuozzo) and OpenVZ. How a virtualized server environment works is simply this: the virtualization software will create virtual partitions (otherwise known as virtual environments), which could host it’s own operating system. Perhaps, partition 1 has Centos as its OS, partition 2 has Ubuntu, and partition 3 has Debian as its OS. And because these are virtualized environments, each having its own dedicated RAM/CPU and harddisk resources, even if one website crashes, it would not affect the performance of the other websites hosted on it. Each VE works independently. How clever is that? For the MIS department, it would mean having just one server to deal with. That means money save because the company doesn’t need to replicate its manpower and money spent of different servers.
In one of our articles in the future, we will examine how companies can manage a cost-effective disaster recovery plan through server virtualization.