One “box” many servers:
Server virtualisation has transformed IT and made office technology more cost-effective and flexible than ever before.
As you may or may not be aware, multiple servers can be run from within the same physical machine. For the business owner, this means one hardware warranty and one physical device to power, cool and house, and that’s very good news for the IT budget! It also means that moving a snapshot of the virtual server from one physical machine to another is possible, and it’s this technology that has enabled incredible advances in the area of disaster-recovery and continuity planning.
Virtual machines can be restored to completely dissimilar hardware. Before they came into existence, IT technicians knew that a replacement physical server was unlikely to have any of the same hardware drivers and other software utilities of it’s predecessor. This meant that restoring a recent tape backup could only be done easily if the target was the same machine from which the data was first read. Now however, with the advent of virtual machinery, many backup and snapshot technologies are able to restore entire virtual servers to other servers or even different data centres, in minutes!
Virtual Desktops
The next logical step is the complete virtualisation of the user’s desktop. The virtualised desktop has enabled companies to take control and standardise the IT environment for their employees, even if their teams are based in disparate locations and connected only by an internet connection.
Large documents and collaborative projects can be worked on without the data leaving the security and control of the company’s own secure servers. There’s no danger of employees compromising the security of valuable intellectual property by working through insecure connections or on PCs that aren’t regularly maintained and looked after.
Virtual Desktop simulates the benefits of employees working in the same physical location. There will be instant secure access and no slow downloads of documents through a VPN to the office, nor even slower uploads of altered documents back.
IT Support providers everywhere are helping companies to embrace Virtualisation. Initially, servers running as virtual machines within other servers may seem like a strange technological solution. The benefits, however, are now overridingly clear.