Virtualization - are you on the bandwagon?

A few weeks back I posted about the Future of IT. The mention was mostly based around SaaS and the cloud concepts, however an article I read today prompted me get my thoughts flowing on virtualization. Scott Allen Miller, a frequent flyer in the Spiceworks Community, published an article on Considering Virtualization for Small Business. This is worth reading if the concept of virtualization is on your radar at all. The article gets into each area that virtualization can touch, but my rambling here is going to focus on our real life application of virtualization and our future plans.

As a loyal employee of an SMB, I can say first hand that we have put off purchases in the last year (not only because of the slowing economy) in order to help make our case for a fairly pricey purchase for the hardware that will fit our virtualization needs and dreams. Most of what we run in the server room comes from Dell, so its a natural step to look towards the EqualLogic SAN for the heart of our virtualization project. With load balancing and disaster recovery features built into the smart device, our department is drooling until we get the approval for this. It's no small price tag all said and done (upwards of $15k) but will be a much needed upgrade for our infastructure. Don't let that pricetag scare you, that is the hardware at the top of our wishlist, and we will probably end up having to knock it down a bit. Plenty can be done with virtualization for free, more on those options coming up. But what will this hefty purchase prepare us for?

• Disaster Recovery - a REAL solution that we can count on.
• Server Load Balancing - Beautiful when our peak season comes about and everyone is pulling 15mb files from SharePoint.
• Open the door for our Server 2008 upgrades that are going to need to happen
• Scalability for future upgrades
• Long term savings on new hardware and storage
• We're trendy - go green like everyone else.
  

Now this hardware upgrade is not phase one of virtualization by any means. You can start tinkering with the idea for free with products like MS Virtual PC, or VirutalBox (which I have to mention is very nice, just recently installed on my Ubuntu machine). For the last year and a half or so, our Dell PE2900 has been running several VM's to run our MS Communications server, development web server, and a few SQL databases. The machine itself was intended to power our in house CRM at first and we squeezed every last bit of juice and storage capacity out of it. Now phase 2 will be to get some intimidating hardware in here and make the transition for the rest of our physical servers. Couple that with the changes to our CRM going to SaaS, and we will be looking at some major performance increases and some serious changes in our infrastructure that will impact our users in a very positive way. I'll steal this from Scott's article, because he said it very well:

"Virtualization is a great opportunity to lower cost and raise productivity while reducing risk for businesses of any size and with budgets as low as zero. Many technologies promise important improvements for businesses but most create questionable value while incurring real cost."

Virtualization gets me excited..thats how I know IT is for me.