Virtual Servers…
What are virtual servers and what are they good for? While they are good for a lot of things, here are a few ideas how they could work wonders for your small business. Consider that you are running a specialized software package to support your small business. If there is an upgrade, what is your testing process. What if you could test in an almost live environment, and simply try again if it didn’t work correctly. Virtual Server by Microsoft can help you do just that. Consider you are looking to upgrade hardware and you need as little down time as possible. What if you only had to move 2 files to another piece of hardware and your business was back up and running? How cool would that be?
Today’s hardware is so powerful that many small businesses could benefit from using Virtual Server to support their business. If you are investing a good bit of money on the hardware to support Small Business Server, consider that the processor and memory probably aren’t doing much and could be used for other things. What if you could put a terminal server on the same hardware as your Small Business Server. You could make use of the extra disk space, plus the leftover processor that is not being used.
Virtual Server is a piece of software that allows you to run 1 or more actual separate servers on one set of hardware. For instance, you cannot run Terminal Server in the same space as Small Business Server because of different software environmental needs, but what if Small Business Server was virtual? Then you could run a Terminal Server in another virtual server process on the same hardware. This would save on the hardware cost of a physical server for Terminal Services.
As Tech Squared, Inc. moves forward we are already planning our migration to Virtual Server. We have several small servers that we use to support our business. Our next hardware server purchase will be large enough to move all of those servers onto one set of hardware. We will move from 7 physical servers to 1 physical server, running 7 Virtual Server instances. We will have one server using electricity, cooling, and floor space. While we will have to purchase a larger server initially, we will not have to replace the 6 other servers as they age. We will simply migrate them one at a time to Virtual Server.