Reap the benefits of virtualisation

If there's one word that's been causing excitement in the IT press in recent years it's virtualisation. Previously the preserve of large enterprises, virtual servers are now being seen in even the smallest of business and with them comes huge business benefits.

At Geek-Guru we utilise the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor (included free as part of Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2) to provide virtualised IT systems to our clients. These are some of the benefits our clients are already enjoying by switching to a virtualised infrastructure.

• Set up Costs

  Perhaps the biggest saving businesses will make when adopting virtualisation is in set-up costs. Many popular configurations for SME's require two or more servers to implement. Traditionally this required two or more physical boxes. With virtualisation you can now run those two servers as virtual machines on a single box, potentially saving thousands on hardware costs.

• Running Costs

  As a general rule it's safe to assume that two physical servers (of the same spec) will consume double the power that a single physical server consumes. However, a physical server configured as a hypervisor consumes very little extra energy whether it's running two, three of four virtual machines. This means that a virtualised infrastructure is far more efficient in terms of power consumption and therefore running costs than the equivalent number of physical machines.

• Disaster Recovery

  Virtual machines have significant benefits in terms of backup, disaster recovery and migration. Many businesses are taking an active interest in disaster recovery planning and a virtualised infrastructure opens up a whole new array of possibilities.