Virtualization for Small and Medium Business Challenges

Small and medium businesses know how challenging it is to keep IT infrastructure costs low while providing high availability and responsive service for customers. They typically do not have the budget to hire specialized IT staff to handle procurement, provision resources for their data center and desktops, protect data, manage upgrades and patches, and field help-desk calls. In addition, there usually is not enough funding for the technologies that have traditionally been required for high availability of key business applications, such as active/active fail-over, sophisticated clustering, or faulttolerant hardware.

Benefits

Server and desktop virtualization can change all this—lowering IT infrastructure costs, providing more responsive service to customers, and enabling higher business continuity—all with existing IT staff levels.

• Reduce costs: By increasing server utilization, small and medium businesses can consolidate physical servers and cut capital costs. Centralizing provisioning and management, and automating many tasks, can also significantly lower IT support costs while improving the productivity of IT staff.

• Ensure business continuity: Virtualization enables small and medium businesses to have the same kind of high availabilitythat, in the past, only larger enterprises could afford. These companies can protect the data and IT resources that run their business with simple provisioning, improved data protection, higher levels of availability, and streamlined backup and disaster recovery—without investing in a large replication infrastructure. In addition, many small and medium businesses are turning to their solution providers to provide off-site disaster recovery.

Below are the different Virtualization Types.

Server Virtualization

Server virtualization creates a separate operating system environment that is logically detached from the host server. This enables organizations to increase server utilization rates, allow applications to leverage a greater density of computing resources, and facilitate benefits such as high availability and disaster recovery.

Desktop Virtualization

Desktop virtualization allows companies to host desktops in virtual machines in the data center, enabling each end user to obtain access via a remote graphics protocol. Alternatively, desktop virtualization can also enable you to create a separate operating system environment on the user’s desktop, enabling several operating systems and their corresponding applications to run on simultaneously on the user’s desktop.

Application Virtualization

Application virtualization separates the application layer from the operating system on a desktop. This reduces application conflicts and enables centralized, simplified patch management and updates.

Presentation Virtualization

Presentation virtualization isolates computing processes from the graphics and input/output functions, making it possible to run an application in one location (say on a server in the data center) but have it be viewed and controlled in another location (say on a client PC in a branch office).

In Conclusion

Beyond the potentially dramatic cost savings from server hardware and server maintenance to power consumption, virtualization can also greatly enhance an organization's business agility, IT departments everywhere are being asked to do more with less, through full resource utilization. Virtualization technologies offer a direct and readily quantifiable means of achieving that mandate.