NSI CT Network Support Team explains why virtualization is the key, and asks: If your IT center were to shut down how long could your business stay open? Would you still be able to function in the short run or is everything completely stopped if you don't have access to your IT center? These are some very important questions to ask if you run a business that relies on computers and the internet to function. For every hour that your systems are off line that is revenue lost to your business. By having your servers virtualized you not only save money by reducing hardware and energy consumption, but also increase your ability to recover if a disaster should occur.
Recover to any hardware
By using a virtualized environment you don’t have to worry about having completely redundant hardware. Instead you can use almost any x86 platform as a backup solution, this allows you to save money by repurposing existing hardware and also gives your company more agility when it comes to hardware failure as almost any virtual server can be restarted on different hardware.
Backup and restore full images
By having your system completely virtualized each of your server’s files are encapsulated in a single image file. An image is basically a single file that contains all of server’s files, including system files, programs, and data; all in one location. By having these images it makes managing your systems easy and backups become as simple as duplicating the image file and restores are simplified to simply mounting the image on a new server.
Run other workloads on standby hardware
A key benefit to virtualization is reducing the hardware needed by utilizing your existing hardware more efficiently. This frees up systems that can now be used to run other tasks or be used as a hardware redundancy. This mixed with features like VMware’s High Availability, which restarts a virtual machine on a different server when the original hardware fails, or for a more robust disaster recovery plan you can use Fault Tolerance, which keeps both servers in sync with each other leading to zero downtime if a server should fail.
Easily copy system data to recovery site
Having an offsite backup is a huge advantage if something were to happen to your specific location, whether it be a natural disaster, a power outage, or a water pipe bursting, it is nice to have all your information at an offsite location. Virtualization makes this easy by easily copying each virtual machines image to the offsite location and with the easy customizable automation process, it doesn’t add any more strain or man hours to the IT department.
