start typing. here's my post.

The CEO's Cheat Sheet to Virtualization

Just because you’re a small business doesn’t mean technology decisions come easy. Like many larger businesses, you are juggling the demand to “do more with less” and the need to invest precious dollars in business growth and strategic decisions. With shrinking budgets and hiring freezes, every opportunity to consolidate and protect your critical technology should be a “no-brainer.” Enter virtualization.

As a category of technology, virtualization is broadly defined and can serve many functions in business infrastructure. Clearly, it is one of the buzz words of the year – though few business owners know exactly why. Here’s your cheat sheet to what matters:

1. Virtualization refers to technical processes which result in the simulation of multiple individual computers on one physical instance of hardware.

2. Virtualization can occur on servers, desktops and laptops.

3. Virtualization benefits include:

• Avoiding the cost of additional computer equipment – buy one beefy server for all your applications and save money over the costs of individual servers for every application.
• Insuring highly available computer resources – quickly and transparently failover between virtualized servers when hardware failures or software glitches take your systems offline.
• Simplifying computer administration and management – with one focal point, you can concentrate on and consistently apply your best practice policies.
• Solving legacy application and operating system issues – get rid of the dedicated servers and desktops running old applications
• Smarter management and security of computers – defend and protect a single front in the war against hackers.
• Free-up valuable IT resources for other tasks – stop doing IT the hard way and start using tools to work smarter.

4. There are more than a dozen mainstream virtualization platform vendors, including:

• VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix. Each has niche market expertise, but VMware and Microsoft are two of the major players according to studies.

5. Most small and mid-sized business are using virtualization for:

• Consolidation – reduces equipment costs, consumable expenses (heating, cooling, power, etc) and increases utilization of resources (un-used processing capacity)
• Legacy support – keeps that ancient server in the closet running the out-dated application that everyone is afraid to touch and couldn’t be replaced.
• Testing – carve off a portion of a server already in use to “try out” changes to configurations or applications without disrupting your production systems

6. Avoid the following common pitfalls:

• Lack of experience in configuring virtualization technology
• Errors in licensing for virtualization software and applications running on virtualized platforms
• Under or over-powered virtualized machines
• Expecting to spend dramatically less on the overall solution

7. What’s next? Virtualization is one of those “you have to see it to understand it” technologies. Schedule a webinar with a solution provider or a manufacturer to see how it might apply to your environment. Then run the numbers and see how long it takes for the virtualization environment to return on the investment. It’s no longer an emerging technology and is likely worth your investigation time if you have 3 or more servers in use.