Can Virtualization Help My Small Business?

14 04 2008

Sometimes I think virtualization, although scary, is a no brainer for medium to large companies. In today’s world server sprawl has become a major problem and costs companies a lot of money not only on server hardware, but power, cooling, support, and square footage.

On the other side you have small businesses that generally have a different make up. Many do not have data centers and some have no more than a handful of servers.

Can virtualization help them?

What are the ways that it can benefit them without breaking the bank?

The first question is easy, yes! You can quickly add some features to a small business that has only been available to enterprises before. Depending on the needs you can really gain some benefits and savings from virtualizing a small group of servers.

Backup and Disaster Recovery – You quickly gain the ability to have full backups and disaster recovery for your server. Since the servers are essentially files, they are more portable and easier to build a process for DR around.
Gain Resources – This sounds funny since you are essentially consolidating multiple physical servers into a few physical servers running a virtualization technology on it. However small businesses generally do not have as large of a budget for buying a lot of physical servers to handle new tasks. This leads to consolidating many apps on each server and causing potential problems or not getting the needed application. Now adding an additional server is much cheaper.

How can this be done without breaking the bank? Depending on the level of support you require you can generally find that the free versions of virtualization technologies will be more than enough to handle what you need. Most of the major vendors have free versions such as; VMware Server, Citrix XenServer Express, and OpenVZ.

You may find that you need the support and enhanced versions. What I have found it that it is really not as expensive for a small environment as one might think. Especially with the competition!

Some things you do want to consider, is storage. If you plan on stepping up to the higher end products you may want to bring in storage. This again does not have to be high end, expensive storage. You may find Iscsi to suit your needs.

Virtualization is not one of those technologies that are limited to the larger companies. There is a place for smaller companies for virtualization. Not only can it be an enabler for you company, it can be a savior as well.

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15 04 2008: #1 Daniel Hernandez (Reply)

So for small companies. Here is a baseline by no means is it a standard, and I admit there’s been challenges.

So a lot of small companies have the need for the following

Phonesystem
email system
Virtual boxes.

So a quick setup that kind of works is.

I order them a server that has Ilo or if its Dell its DRAC. I load CentOS and Asterisk. I also load VMserver.

So the main OS runs Asterisk and VM server.

Then as a VM am running SBS 2003 which handles Exchange, File and Print.

Then depending on the company I may need a few additional VM's for Partners.

So this works out well because in the past I used to present more than one box at small company and managing one box and being able to backup everything and bring things back online quickly has helped.

Humm I may look into ISCSI but as of right now I consider small shops any where from 5 -30 users and I really haven’t had a need for these guys to run ISCSI just yet.

But at a glance the cost is the server with redundancy as well the SBS license and depending if I load any additional guest then those licenses as well. I order the server with reasonable support. So that I don’t put the client at huge outage window. Its rare am not saying it doesn’t happen that the entire box gets lost. But if the correct support is ordered if any issues occur I let the Server vendor handle the hardware. Should I need to scrap the entire server and start from scratch. I just ILO and restore backup from Online service. If necessary.

But I will say there isn’t one SMB client that currently isn’t running some sort of free Virtualization app. Another quick two stories would be. There was a shop still running NT server yes I know don’t even get me started. But to making a long story short that box hardware day came and I removed the drives BartPE the data onto a Laptop running VMserver and had everything running. Another scenario was needed to perform an upgrade of SBS 2k to SBS 2k3 and used the swing method which required another box. I just created VM remotely and did the entire upgrade offsite. So free VM software does benefit small companies and the companies that support them.
15 04 2008: #1.1 Clint Eschberger (Reply)

Hey great reply/post! I think the fact that while you do have a similar baseline of servers a SMB may run, the fact that there are so many variables that having the virtualization base setup down, it makes it easy to grow for the company.

I do really think it makes it easy for the people supporting the SMB as well as you mentioned.

As for the iSCSI, the reason I really like it is for the shared storage. Not so much with the free virtualization products, but for those that do make that step up and have around 20+ servers. Now you start adding some redundancy to the environment.
19 04 2008: #2 Vinf (Reply)

Definitley of use to the SME market, they always need lots of different apps/functions and the VM approach can give quick setup, and less hardware to run.

SME's typically proliferate applications to support their needs, they're quite often underestimated in the complexity of their IT requirements and don't have the budget and dedicated staffing of larger orgs.

I've a post here http://vinf.net/2008/04/19/vmware-server-performance-a-practical-example/ about a company doing just that, rather than having to incrementally buy n x low-end poor quality "servers" they are able to lease (or spread purchase) one quality server with redundant h/w + standby and run all their services from it.
19 04 2008: #2.1 Clint Eschberger (Reply)

"SME's typically proliferate applications to support their needs, they're quite often underestimated in the complexity of their IT requirements and don't have the budget and dedicated staffing of larger orgs."

That right there really sums up why they do benefit from virtualization. They can and do have quite complex needs without a budget for the "traditional" methods.

Good article as well!

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