The benefits of virtual technology are so great and numerous that you’d think it might be redundant to mention them all. Virtualization in the corporate, educational, and research labs offers many advantages, including consolidation of physical IT inventory; reduced operating costs, power consumption and drastic improvements in both, customer and employee, up-time. As good as that all sounds, you might think that virtually everyone has jumped on the virtual-bandwagon. Not so. According to research from Gartner, 60% of all servers in the work place remain un-virtualized. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, 59% of companies are still not utilizing virtualized, Teir-1 workloads. For the remaining 3rd of the technology work-force who is and has been virtualizing for a few years, this must sound like the rest of the world is living in the stone age. So, why is there such a reluctance to embrace the many benefits of virtualization?
Why Not Virtualize?
Why Not Virtualize? Most of the reasons fall under one category: The fear of the unknown. Virtualization requires a new way of doing things and enforces change, commitment and new responsibilities upon IT Managers. Both Physical and virtual servers require management and control within the company infrastructure. New corporate policies and procedures are requires to maintain the technology; a new thought-process and education behind the backing-up and archiving of data of virtual servers is vital and more advanced, better ways to monitor the performance and make technology is being maximized within the requirements of user satisfaction. While these are certainly obstacles to making the transition to virtualization, they certainly are not good enough reasons on their own to keep companies from making the switch. Why virtualize?
Why Virtualize?
With Windows Server 2008 R2 and the latest SP1 release, the excuses have become even less viable. Perhaps not all IT people in the field are aware of some of the ways R2, SRVPK 1 has added new functionality to Client and Server Virtualization – making it more of a seamless and transparent experience right out of the box. R2 allows virtualization through Microsoft Hyper-V and Remote Desktop Services (virtual desktop interface), with no need for any additional hypervisor software purchases. Hyper-V and Windows Server is fully integrated with Windows Server 2008 R2. IT administrators can manage, change and monitor system resources as well as handle the migration of virtual servers using a single interface. There is no need for additional, costly and bulky add-on products to make it all work. IT departments can also allocate specific memory thresholds for each, virtual machine alleviating bottle necks and delays. Looking to get started in Virtualization is as easy as looking under the hood of R2, SRVPK 1 and getting familiar with the virtual-ready goodies. In the next few years, there will be fewer IT managers asking the question, “why virtualize?”.
