Downsize Your Server Room

Let’s do a bit of talking about virtualization. This may or may not be old hat to you.  However if you are not implementing virtualization in your environment you may be doing your business a bit of disservice. For those of you not familiar with virtualization you may be asking what is it?  We’ll do our best to give you a good understanding without getting too technical.

Historically you would purchase a server with the hardware that you would assume would last the entire lifecycle of the purchase.  So you would buy the best CPU, most RAM, and storage space with growth and scalability to the highest amount of utilization you can imagine the server could possibly be hit with.  This model would leave you with a large amount of resources not being used the majority of the time and possibly never if your best guess wasn’t accurate.  If you ended up needing more storage or CPU it could also put you in a position that the upgrade and migration process is rather labor intensive.  Sometimes you may want a separate server to separate services so that if one server failed it didn’t affect other services.  An example is that you may want your web server on a separate physical box than your email server so if maintenance was done on your web server email wouldn’t be effected.  In that scenario you end up with twice the cost.  Most of the time that these servers are running the utilization is let’s just say less than 10%.  This is where virtualization comes into play.

Using this small environment we’ve been talking about as a further example we’ll show the added value.  However keep in mind your environment could be set up different.  Virtualization is very scalable and depending on how risk adverse you are it can be very fault tolerant and extremely redundant.  Back to the scenario, you could buy a single server but install each server virtually.  This allows you to install the whole server installation in something that can be related to an app.  Then you can do several installs on the same physical machine and allocate how much of the physical hardware you want to each virtual machine.  For instance if your physical server had 4 CPU’s, 16 gigs of RAM, and 4 terabytes of storage, you could create two virtual machines that have 2 CPU’s, 8 gigs of RAM, and 2 terabytes of storage each.  Or four servers with 1 CPU, 4 gigs of RAM, and 500 gigs (1/2 a terabyte) of storage.  Then down the road if you notice that one of those servers is not using much CPU or RAM but the other is not you can easily in the virtualization software change one of the servers to have more CPU and RAM while removing it from another.  You can also sort of double book the hardware knowing that one server may not be using the CPU or RAM when another is.  With the storage you can allocate space to the server as needed instead of giving that one server a terabyte you could give it 500 gigs and then add space when needed.  That way let’s say your email server starts using more space than you expected you can in the virtualization program add more storage on the fly without even shutting the machine down.  Then down the road when you need to move the “virtualized servers” to new hardware it’s just a matter of copying the files over to the new hardware instead of having to reinstall everything and set up a new server. The virtualization process also allows you to take what are called snapshots.  This allows you to roll back to exactly how the server was set up when you took the snapshot with the click of a button and a few minutes instead of a long backup and recovery process.

Ultimately there are more features and abilities we can discuss in a virtualized environment, however, at the end of the day the process is simple.  It will save money in power, hardware, administration, and lead to an network strategy that allows for easy maintenance, upgrades, and redundancy.