A few things to consider as you begin your journey to Virtualization
We’d like to introduce a special guest blogger, Maria Pressley, Senior Vice President of Presales Engineering at Unitrends. Maria will be focusing on hot topics that the engineering team comes across when working with current and prospective Unitrends’ clients.
My dog is not much help when it comes to discussing strategy for virtualizing IT environments. He basically gives me that look:
But virtualization is now at the core of IT infrastructure and growth, and it is one of the hottest technology movements and investments in 2012. Virtualization technologies are now reaching into the SMB space with greater affordability and functionality.
It looks like Microsoft’s Hyper-V will be a huge factor in this adoption rate over the next months. Gartner predicts that “by the end of the year 85% of the businesses below 1000 employees that are using virtualization will use Hyper-V.”
So here are some things to consider and research as you begin your journey to virtualization:
– Which hypervisor platform are you most comfortable with? Cost, technology and OS familiarity are different and yet a factor for each:
- Hyper-V
- VMware
- Xen
- An open-source Linux platform (Virtual Iron, Qemu/KVM, other?)
– What tools do you need to aid in your migration from physical to virtual servers?
– What type(s) of storage and servers will you leverage for your virtualized environment?
– How important is on-premise and off-premise recovery?
- Do you have internal SLA’s for recovering VM’s?
- Do you have internal requirements for long-term retention and reporting?
There are tons of tools, software packages, and services available to assist you in the journey. Unitrends offers quite a comprehensive set
– from P2V (physical to virtual) migration of your servers
– to incremental snapshot backups of your VM’s for VMware and Hyper-V
– to instant spin-up of your VM’s from a Unitrends synthesizes snapshot backup
All of this functionality is offered either on a physical server with its own storage, or in a software-only Virtual Machine if you’ve got servers and storage already allocated for backup data. It’s definitely worth a look.
