If you are looking for ways to simplify the management of your IT infrastructure, we recommend considering the benefits of server virtualisation. Virtualising your servers, not only allows for easy and simplified administration and maintenance, but can also help you to make significant cost savings. Here we will take a look at the benefits of server virtualisation in greater detail.

Separating servers

Many small businesses purchase all-in-one servers in order to save money. The problem with these servers is that all of the resources they are hosting are essentially competing with each other. You also have to consider that if everything is stored on one single server and it fails, you could be in a bit of a mess!

The great thing about server virtualisation is that it provides a cost-effective option for separating your servers, thus making your IT processes easier to manage. For example, you can have an email server, application server and a database server. By separating your servers, you will be able to benefit from improved security and reliability.

Increased uptime

Server virtualisation will simplify IT infrastructure management by making downtime less of a concern. Virtualised server platforms have a number of advanced features including: live migration, storage migration, fault tolerance and distributed resource scheduling, all of which allow businesses to benefit from better business continuity and increased uptime.

Although server virtualisation can significantly help businesses decrease downtime, it also facilitates quick recovery by moving from one virtual server to another in rare cases of unplanned outage.

Virtualised servers make redeployment quick and easy. This is due to the fact that it is straightforward to create regular snapshots and make use of specific back-up tools to ensure that your information can be redeployed to a new virtual server (if necessary) so that disruption to end users is minimised.

Extend the life of old applications

Another common issue that IT staff face is the juggling and management of old applications. If you are running old applications that are no longer updated by the developers, one good way to manage them is on a virtualised server. By doing this, you can isolate the application from its environment.

This means you can extend its lifetime, maintain availability and get rid of the old hardware you were using to run the application, helping to save on costs and boost efficiency.

Whilst we are on the topic of isolation, it is also worth mentioning that virtualised servers provide the perfect environment for testing. If, for one reason or another you make a mistake, there are options to go back to using a previous snapshot.

You will also be able to isolate any testing you have carried out so that it does not affect your live business systems end users until your changes are ready for deployment.

Migrating to the Cloud

By managing your IT infrastructure using server virtualisation, you will also be taking many of the steps to prepare your business to move to the Cloud. This could allow you to get rid of your old hardware, thus significantly reducing costs in the form of energy, maintenance and upgrades.

Using server virtualisation to migrate to the Cloud could enable you to improve the efficiency of your processes and allow for simplified management of your IT processes.

Greener Infrastructure Management

Over the last few years in particular, the majority of businesses have made going green (or saving money on power costs) one of their top priorities. Whilst most businesses have implemented recycling and energy saving schemes in the work place, many are still yet to realise the green benefits of server virtualisation.

Simply managing your IT infrastructure with server virtualisation will help to lower your monthly power usage and costs.

Conclusion

In order to achieve simple IT infrastructure management, server virtualisation is one of the best ways forward. Not only will it allow you to gain better control over your IT processes, but it could also help you to save money in the long run.

For more information about server virtualisation and its benefits, feel free to get in touch with David Lawrence on 0131 603 7910.