Server Virtualization Tips for Small Firms

While server virtualization has been largely adopted by large enterprises, adoption is now rapidly expanding among smaller businesses. Tech reporter Drew Robb details facts to consider as your small or medium-sized firm gets on board the virtualization train.

Server virtualization is really all about gaining more from what you have. It allows companies to make one server act as five, ten or even twenty virtual servers. The need to do so has become more apparent as processors have become far more powerful in recent years.

“The increase in the power and memory capacity of today’s servers means they are often underutilized, and have excess capacity,” said Tony Parkinson, Dell’s vice president of consumer, SMB enterprise solutions.

Historically, businesses used to add a new server for each new application. One server acted as a mail server, another as a central repository for office files, another for the customer database and so on. Technology from the likes of Microsoft and VMware, known as a hypervisor, enables a single server to be sub-divided to run multiple instances of operating systems and applications, which lets small business use the full power of that server. 

A hypervisor, then, is a computer program that allows multiple operating systems to share a single piece of hardware known as a host. This host, is the home of multiple virtual servers — also known as guests, virtual machines or VMs.

Read the rest about server virtualization at Small Business Computing.

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