Features and Benefits of Virtualization Solutions

Hardware Abstraction

Hardware abstraction reduces human effort and downtime associated with hardware changes, breaks, modifications, etc. This also keeps you from locking into specific hardware or vendors. Need to upgrade RAM or CPU? Need to add storage or a network adapter? This is incredibly simple and extremely quick. The days of “estimating” your hardware requirements are gone – there is no longer a need to oversubscribe resources to a server before it is employed. You can add shared resources as needed down the road with minimal downtime.

Ease of Migration

This plays on the first statement. Not being tied down to particular hardware allows you to easily and quickly move a virtual machine (or a copy of the machine) to another physical host or hosting location.

This is a huge bonus for maintenance, load balancing or disaster recovery.

Encapsulation of Storage

Encapsulation of storage enables massively simplified total system backup and restore, enabling extremely rapid bare metal restores. Your entire machine is a set of files. It can’t get much easier than that.

Snapshots

Snapshots allow for simplified testing and protection from bad changes. If you mess up your physical machine you might be stuck fixing your issue for hours, days, or worse. If you mess up your VM just roll the snapshot back to the previous state. Done! This alone is invaluable.

Ease of Archiving

Ease of archiving old systems (zip and store) is a huge asset. Once you are done with a machine you can power it down and copy the files off to stale storage. Need that machine again? Copy it back over and fire it up in minutes.

Ease of Growth

Virtualization eases you into figure growth with options for “pay for” add-ons like HA, vMotion, etc. Some of these features are free depending on selection platform (Hyper-V, Xen). With many hypervisors it is as easy as applying a new license key to unlock new features that can greatly improve your datacenter’s functionality. Start small and work your way up as you grow. Virtualization allows you to be flexible in implementations.

Improved Monitoring and Troubleshooting

Most hypervisor solutions allow management of all physical hosts through a central console where you can easily compare resource usage and see a history of tasks and events. You can easily make comparisons between physical and virtual servers and perform in-depth analysis and troubleshooting.

Workload Consolidation

~2-100 workloads can be placed on a single piece of hardware reducing physical purchases and consumed rack space dramatically, as well as lowering energy and cooling costs. Rather than needing to put in a purchase order for a new server, you can have a new virtual machine spun up in minutes.Most physical boxes are incredibly under-used because of software limitations (such as the need to separate applications or roles from each other). You can keep these separated while running them on the same hardware.

Ease of Enviroment Segmentation

This plays on the above statement. Need something separated? Spin off a new VM on the same hardware. Minimal change in hardware usage while meeting your needs – plus you didn’t need to buy a new box. This changes what could have been a huge inconvenience to a minor one – maybe even an advantage instead.

Improved Remote Management

Remote Management capabilities allow you to completely manage a machine from a remote location. You can address what would have typically been an on-site visit through a remote console, including resource upgrades, network troubleshooting, power on/off operations, and more. This can greatly increase the efficiency of server management while cutting travel costs and downtime.

Contact us now to see how we can assist you with your virtual needs.