If you’re a small or medium-sized business (SMB), your business is challenged to keep IT expenses low while providing a high quality of service to your customers. If you’re a small business (around five servers and less than 25 desktops or laptops), chances are you don’t have a full-time IT staff to handle systems management tasks such as patches and upgrades, disaster recovery, and business continuity. If you’re a medium-sized business (5-30 servers and 25 – 250 desktops or laptops), then you probably have 1-4 IT staff who are “generalists” and perform a broad range of tasks on any given day.
That’s where virtualization comes in. Small and medium business virtualization products can help you provide a higher level of IT service while at the same time lowering costs—all with your current level of IT staffing.
Microsoft offers a range of products to help you virtualize and manage your IT infrastructure, whether you’re a medium-sized business with a small on-site IT staff, or a small business working with a partner to help manage your IT. Hyper-V provides a virtual platform on which you can consolidate multiple server roles as separate VMs running on a single physical machine. You can download Hyper-V server for free to access server virtualization capabilities, or if you already have Windows Server 2008 or plan to upgrade, you will have Hyper-V already built-in. Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Workgroup Edition combined with System Center Essentials 2007 enables increased physical server utilization, rapid provisioning, and centralized management of physical and virtual machines. Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 provides comprehensive systems management capabilities such as monitoring and alerting, software distribution, update management, and software and hardware inventory management. Microsoft partners provide complementary business continuity solutions, such as replication for virtual machines without using SAN, which reduces downtime and improves availability. Windows Small Business Server 2008 and Windows Essentials Business Server 2008 include Windows Server 2008 Standard technologies which support virtualization with Hyper-V and improve your business functions.
In summary, virtualization offers many key benefits to small and medium businesses to help you:
Reduce IT costs
Improve availability
Improve service quality
