The Benefits Of Virtualization For IT Equipment
Gone are the days of countless racks of servers as far as the eye can see. Virtualization is becoming the overwhelming choice for IT equipment. Using virtualization instead of dedicated hardware makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons.
Size equals money
Consider a facility with 60 physical servers. Each piece of IT equipment requires a set amount of air conditioning to keep cool and a set amount of power to stay online. Imagine cutting air and power bills by 95%. It can be done. In this example, these 60 physical machines could be hosted across three servers running a virtualization application. Instead of paying for power and air for 60 computers, you pay for power and air for three servers only. Decreasing the server footprint means shrinking IT bills.
Redundancy is good
In our example, 60 servers have been converted to virtual machines now hosted on three virtualization servers. This doesn't just save money. It also offers redundancy. Virtualization applications can move virtual guests from one physical machine to another. This means that if a virtual host server crashes, its partners will take over the machines its guests for zero downtime. Virtualization offers redundancy that physical IT equipment just cannot compete with.
Easy disaster recovery
Think about what happens when a physical server crashes spectacularly and cannot be brought back to life. A Replacement must be obtained, backup media brought from offsite, and then IT administrators must hope their never-practised disaster recovery methods actually work. Now consider this with virtualization. There is no hardware to suddenly die. If a virtual server crashes and must be restored to a prior date, all an administrator needs to do is revert to a previous snapshot backup of the guest. Consider this: ordering and rebuilding hardware, recalling backups, restoring and testing the server could take days. The virtual method takes this down to a few clicks and, at most, hours. When a server is down, time lost is money lost. Virtualization saves time and money.
Why pay for hardware you aren't using?
Virtualization adds an layer of efficiency. The 60 servers in the previous examples need dedicated RAM, processors and drive space. Do they use this hardware to the fullest, 24/7/365? Of course not. Hardware resources which sit unused unused are a waste. Virtual machines acquire resources from their hosts as needed, with limits and other parameters defined by technicians, and then the servers give these resources back when finished. Virtual hosts also perform load balancing. Think of our example of three hosts running 60 guest machines. If one host's resources are all occupied by its guests, it will simply hand off guests as needed to less-busy neighbors.
Considering the cost of power, the need for redundancy, the necessity of easy disaster recovery and the price of efficiency, it is easy to see the benefits of virtualization. A day will come soon where the only physical servers are those who are running virtual host applications and hosting many virtual servers inside.
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