Virtualisation

Virtualisation for servers is running more than one server on a single piece of equipment. The immediate advantage is an immediately lower cost of ownership from both a maintenance point of view as well as the capital cost of the hardware.

A secondary advantage of virtualisation is availability and reliability. “Virtual Machines” (e.g. a virtual server) can be easily ported from one server to another. This is especially useful for migrating to newer more powerful hardware, but also means in the event of a hardware failure a virtual machine can usually be moved to another working system and the system can be back up and running quickly. Virtual Machines are not hardware dependent, meaning you could move them around fairly easily. Depending on the complexity of your environment, technologies can be used for almost seamless automatic transfer in the event of both hardware failure or when further resources are needed.

To answer this question simply – Do you have more than one server? If you do, then it’s often more cost effective to run fewer servers than many. This means less to maintain, less to go wrong and fewer headaches – Literally that simple!

Absolutely – This is called P2V – Physical to Virtual. Vmware, for example, have developed a simple tool you would install on physical hosts. This would “copy” the physical system over to the destination virtual server, creating a virtual machine in the process. Only very minor adjustments are needed on the virtual server, primarily networking and within a very short amount of time you can start the virtual server – running exactly as it did when it was running on its own physical hardware.

We can help with that too. Backing up a virtual machine is much easier than doing a bare-metal backup of a physical server. We are veeam partners, the leading manufacturer of virtualisation backup software. Their software is extremely simple to use – Install it on a physical server, choose the virtual machines on the virtual server to backup, choose where to backup to (this would typically be to the local disks on the veeam server) and then hit go. This will take a snapshot of the virtual machine, compress it and save it locally. If the virtual server fails this backup can be restored to another virtual server, for example. There are other features in veeam including replication, so for more cost-savvy environments, whilst a backup can also be created, at the same time the virtual servers can be “mirrored” over to a second virtual server. This second virtual server could be located locally or even in the cloud or at a datacentre in a private location.

Just give us a call and one of our virtualisation sales professionals would be happy to discuss your requirements. Don’t worry if you’re new to virtualisation, we are happy to talk you through exactly how it works and if it is right for your environment.