I received the following in an email from Dusty, one of our consultants out of Nashville. I thought this information might be helpful to some of you, so here it is:
“…Virtualization is a buzzword you’ll be hearing a lot of if you’re going to spend any amount of time in an IT room. But why should you care? And what exactly does virtualization mean to you anyways?
By its technical definition, virtualization means abstracting your computer’s resources to better understand what’s going on inside, and possibly even solve problems and relay these solutions back to the actual computer. In this post we’ll be addressing the virtualization of an entire machine, particularly servers.
There are three main things you’ll accomplish by using virtualization. First, you’re going to save money on hardware because you won’t be buying as many servers. Virtualization allows you to utilize your hardware much more efficiently… so while some of your software needs to run exclusively, some may only run on Linux and others, only on Windows, using virtualization allows you to run all of your software harmoniously on one server.
Another advantage to virtualization is that it makes Backup and Recovery easier becuase you can back the whole machine up and save it as an image or file. Now, that server is portable and supported by almost any hardware, making the backup and recovery processes much simpler. (And, it’s a lot more likely that they are done in a timely and effecient, non-frantic manner.)
VMWare has an established product that is reliable and quick, however Microsoft is stepping up the competition with its recent release of Hyper-V, although the benchmarks aren’t in yet. It will be interesting to see how this competition plays out. With very few other options out there, including Microsoft’s Virtual Server and freeware VirtualBox (which is getting better every day — I’m running a test server on my laptop right now and I am really happy with the performance so far), but neither are as feature rich as the Hyper-V or VMware.
So, the question remains: is virtualization right for you? Maybe it is or maybe it isn’t, but I think I know a consultant or two who could help you out with that.”
from Dusty’s TechTalk blog 🙂
