By Michael Perkins

The short answer is yes. Small business owners of most any size can benefit from virtualization in some way. The first benefit is cost. Traditionally the small business owner would call me up and say, “Mike, we need a new server.” We would sell them a Microsoft Small Business Server to handle email, file and print services. A few months later they would call and say, “We just bought five Blackberry phones.” Okay. We’d sell them another server to run BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server). Even later they’d call and say, “We’ve hired 4 remote workers, how can we connect them?” We’d get them another server to run Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Services. In the course of a year we’ve installed 3 dedicated, power hungry servers, all requiring maintenance, updates, cooling and real estate (rack space or floor space if you have towers).

Fast forward 5 years and Mr. Customer is ready for new servers due to age (out of warranty), performance, etc. He’s facing a costly upgrade to get the new technology installed and running if we are going to replace all his servers. This is where virtualization makes sense. Server consolidation more specifically. Using Microsoft HyperV virtualization technology, I can sell him one physical server to run all 3 of his systems. Our solution involves building a reasonably powered HP Proliant Server running Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition and Virtual Machine Manager. This allows us to run Windows as the Hypervisor with 4 guest operating systems of any flavor, say Windows 2000, 2003 or 2008 (even Linux). Using VMM, we P2V (physical to virtual conversion) his physical servers into virtual guest servers and run them all on the new hardware. This significantly reduces the migration costs, hardware costs and infrastructure costs (power and cooling) because it’s all running on one physical server. Not to mention that Mr. Customer is getting much better utilization of resources compared to the 3 physical server that had unused capacity. Additionally, if he calls me up next month and needs a server to run his new time clock software, no problem. I can spin one up, configure it and have it ready to go, all without even walking in his door.

Reduced cost, reduced footprint, reduced complexity. Yes, virtualization is good for your company.