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Imagine you had 100 physical servers, computers that hosted email, served web pages, stored your files, etc . . . lots of machines that are chore to manage, consume lots of electricity, require even more energy to cool and take up space. Virtualization allows you to consolidate the actual number of physical servers, by converting each of these 100 machines into a virtual machine -- hardware such as processor, hard drives, memory, etc., run like a program.
With today's more powerful and improved hardware, you can probably run about 10 of these virtual machines on 1 physical machine. You are now more green by consuming less energy, less stressed because you've now only maintaining 10 servers and can backup your whole operation more easily because virtual machines are nothing more than flat files.
If you're attending the 2009 ASAE Association Technology Conference and Expo at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, tomorrow and Wednesday and want to know more about Virtualization, please drop by my session at 3:30pm, Wednesday afternoon, in room 146A. I'll be representing the "medium" sized organization while Scott Mearns of Air Transport Association of America will be representing larger operations. Brian Sheehan of DelCor Technology Solutions will moderate and help spark audience discussion. Below is the brochure description:
Think Virtualization is only for large IT shops with hundreds of servers and big budgets? Think again. Considering going virtual but don't know where to begin? Learn the basics of virtualization and how both small and medium sized organizaations can manage the costs. Understand the benefits of virtualization such as going green, creating business continuity and simplifying management. Hear an unbiased comparison of solution providers and walk away with a plan to establish virtualization options at your organization.
Below are more resources from our handout but please stop back AFTER the session as I'll dump more notes and sidebars that we talk about during the session!
Virtualization Resources
We’ve introduced to you the exciting concept of virtualization and many of the great benefits, but as always, there is more to learn. Follow these links to get up to speed on all the benefits, introduce yourself to many of the primary vendors and begin in earnest investigation on whether your organization is virtualization ready.
http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/
http://virtualizationreview.com/
http://www.networkworld.com/topics/virtualization.html
http://www.cio.com/topic/168354/Virtualization
Virtualization Software Overview
Here’s a collection of links to vendors and organizations that provide the software that powers a majority of the enterprise-class virtualization deployments.
Try Virtualization at your Desk
Before even thinking about consolidating your datacenter, get a quick and easy taste for virtualization at the comfort of your own desk by installing the following:
PC users download and install VMware Server for free at: http://vmware.com/products/server/
Mac Users download, buy and install VMWare Fusion for $80: http://vmware.com/products/fusion/
Once installed, visit: http://vmware.com/appliances/ These downloadable “appliances” are actually pre-configured operating system (OS) installations with lots of software built-in to run specific applications such as a Web server, e-mail server, networking monitoring and more. Or if you’re super savvy, begin installing fresh OS installs from install disks. Have fun!
Hardware Vendors
You may want to open accounts with the following hardware vendors and set up appointments with their perspective virtualization vendors to get started with pricing out your virtualization setup:
http://www.cdw.com
http://www.bestbuybusiness.com
http://www.insight.com
http://www.zones.com
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