Blade Watch

Every now and again, we forget that not everyone is at the same stage with their IT, with this in mind and just in case, let’s go over what we mean by virtualization keeping everything simple and trying not to get to technical (what form of virtualization are you) or vendor aligned is it VMware/Xen/xVM?

In the traditional server world you typically bought one server per application to separate the server roles. You might have one server for email, one for application/intranet and another for file/print. This allowed more easy support and in some instances was done as not all applications could work on the same server, some applications were better separated to identify issues and for resilience.

If we adopt a virtualization project therefore, what we are offering is the opportunity to have one physical server with several virtual servers hosted on that physical device.

So for the real estate agents office, we might buy one rack server and on that rack server create:

• One virtual server to host my documents
• One virtual server to run our team wiki or intranet
• One virtual server to run our accounts/hr applications

We’ve therefore reduced the number of physical servers to:

• Power – less electrical cost
• Support – less hardware support cost
• Configure – one hardware configuration

A very powerful concept if you consider that now with a virtual infrastructure, the existing barriers to success have been removed. My server is not ‘tied’ to the hardware, If the server were to fail, I could provision a new server and move my virtual machines across. I can now scale up the infrastructure without acquiring new physical servers, there are limitations of course, but testing something might now not represent capital investment and delays for a new physical server to be ordered, delivered and racked.

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