Maximise your server Investment
Virtualisation will allow you to run multiple independent operating systems on a single physical computer in order to maximise the investment in hardware. Computing power continues to grow exponentially resulting in the capability for more tasks to run on a single server. It is now feasible to turn a very inexpensive commodity server into eight or even 16 virtual servers that run 16 virtual operating systems. Therefore virtualisation technology is a way of achieving higher server density. help4IT can provide the expertise and experience necessary to help small and medium businesses to significantly reduce hardware acquisition and maintenance costs.
Virtualisation is the perfect solution for applications that are meant for small to medium scale usage. Virtualisation should not be used for high performance applications where one or more servers need to be clustered together to meet performance requirements of a single application because the added overhead and complexity would only reduce performance. However many server applications are idle for much of the time and can therefore be effectively virtualised. Most modern servers being used for in-house server duties are utilised from 1 to 5% CPU. Running eight operating systems on a single physical server would elevate CPU utilisation to around 50% but it would average much lower since the peaks and troughs of the virtual operating systems will tend to cancel each other out.
While CPU overhead in most of the virtualisation solutions available today are minimal I/O (input/output) overhead for storage and networking throughput is another story. For servers with extremely high storage or hardware I/O requirements, it would be wise to run their own physical server even if their CPU requirements can be met inside a virtual environment. Help4IT can analyse your processes and advise on I/O bottlenecks.
In order to maintain business continuity it is important not to put all your put all your critical servers onto one physical server. Therefore help4IT can offer solutions where critical services are run on two or more physical servers with seamless redundancy in the event of failure or downtime for maintenance. For more complex services such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL, MySQL or Oracle, help4IT can suggest clustering technologies to synchronise two logical servers hosted across two physical servers. Alternatively it is possible to migrate a virtual server from one physical server to another in a seamless manner by constantly synchronising memory between one physical server and another.
If you want the benefits of vitualisation now it is possible to migrate physical servers to a virtual image, ready to boot up and run as a virtual server. Therefore you do not need to rebuild your servers and manually configure them as a virtual server, we can simply extract them with the entire server configuration intact. Applications running on aging physical servers are the perfect candidates for virtualisation. The annual hardware maintenance costs alone of the old servers would be enough to pay for all the new hardware!
As an added bonus help4IT can easily build in a cost-effective disaster recovery plan because the virtualised images can be used to instantly recover all of your servers. The time to restore a virtual server is a small fraction of the time to restore an old legacy server even if anybody could remember how to do it. Therefore downtime can be reduced from more than one day to less than one hour.
Why not give help4IT a call for some friendly informal advice.
Please do not hesitate to contact us on 0800 043 4448 or take a moment to complete our email contact form for a prompt and friendly response.
