In the corporate world, much is being made of the virtualisation space. The ability to consolidate workloads and reduce the number of hardware servers is a powerful driver in the current ‘Green’ economy. Modern server hardware is being designed and built specifically with virtualisation in mind.

But what about the small businesses, where there may not be an in-house IT support team, where the thought of changing something that isn’t broken is very daunting.

These businesses can also benefit from virtualisation. By deploying a virtualised server platform, either on-site or with a virtualisation partner, small businesses can leverage this technology.

On-site virtualised systems can be remotely managed, effectively reducing, and in some cases removing, the need for on-site IT support staff and associated training. Using this platform can also bring consistency. By building one virtual ‘Master’ server template, any additional servers can be cloned from it, ensuring that any specific patching, security and modifications are present in every server deployed. Using an image like this also means that a new server can be deployed and online in minutes rather than days, and all without new hardware being installed to host it, reducing capital and environmental costs (no additional rack space, server hardware, power, network ports or cooling to provide)

There are many other advantages, including:

• Simplified upgrade path for future hardware refresh
• Rapid backup and recovery using embedded tools
• Disaster recovery using off-site ‘Cloud’ services
• Rapid deployment of new servers
• Instant recovery - image can be taken of the existing server for instant restoration in the event of a problem during patching, upgrade, etc
• Test, development and UAT environments can be rapidly cloned from existing production systems to give a true copy. These same systems can also be redeployed back into production if needed, allowing upgrades to be staged rapidly and effectively.

To investigate whether virtualisation is right for your business, contact us today.

We use and recommend VMware virtualisation products