The other day I had a conversation with a prospective customer who is representative of many of the clients I deal with.  This particular customer has a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for the financial services industry and is running redundant web servers, application servers, and database servers.  They were asking questions such as, “How do I scale my IT infrastructure quickly and cost effectively?” and “How do I ensure redundancy and reliability without breaking the bank?”

My recommendation:  virtualization.  While virtualization is not the silver bullet to solve all business or IT problems, it brings to the table a unique set of strengths.   Two features of virtualization that I want to touch on are the ability to SCALE and PROTECT your business.  VMware is today’s virtualization market leader and the company I’ll be focusing on when making reference to specific virtualization features

First, scaling your business.

We’ll assume your business is growing and you want to facilitate future expansion.   Let’s say you want to add another server.  How long does that take?  What if you only need additional resources to support seasonal upticks and don’t need that additional infrastructure permanently?  Want to add additional servers in minutes instead of hours or days?  What if you could de-commission a server in minutes after a busy season and never had to worry about large up front capital costs to amortize?  Ok, ok, enough with the line of questioning.

Virtualization makes it all possible.  In a virtualized environment, servers run inside a virtual machine.  VMware creates a software layer that facilitates communication between virtualized servers and the physical hardware it runs on.  Servers are typically underutilized with an average utilization between 5% and 25%.  Virtualization lets you put those spare resources to use!  Additional servers can now be provisioned on existing hardware by a few clicks of the mouse as opposed to ordering another physical machine.  That means no waiting for it to ship, unpacking it, racking it in your computer room or data center, cabling it up, and configuring it.  In the same way, servers deployed virtually without additional hardware can be de-commissioned knowing that precious budget dollars were not wasted on capital equipment purchases for short or midterm projects.

Now, how does virtualization protect your business?

By virtualizing systems, businesses can save costs while not just ensuring the same level of protection for their business, but increasing protection and redundancies.  What’s even better is that the larger your business scales, the greater the cost savings.

Let’s use the customer I mentioned at the beginning as an example.  Instead of deploying six physical servers, the customer decided to use virtualization and run all six servers as virtual machines on only two physical servers.  If one of the servers fails, the virtual machines running on the failed server will reboot themselves automatically on the active physical server.  This self-healing environment keeps the business up and running while a system administrator can troubleshoot or replace the failed hardware.  Total downtime in this virtual environment is approximately 1-2 minutes for the virtual machines to reboot themselves on the other physical system.  It could have taken multiple hours in a purely physical environment.

Is virtualization right for everyone?  Not necessarily, but it does bring a unique feature set and group of benefits forth that can aid a business as it grows and seeks to protect itself from the unexpected.  I’d encourage anyone to sit down and talk with a virtualization expert about your specific situation and environment.

VMware will be presenting a session on virtualization at the VISION 2008 conference on November 13, 2008.  You may want to check it out.  Reading about it is one thing, but talking to an expert or participating in a whiteboard session can bring it alive.   Feel free to contact me if you have any questions on virtualization.