Thinking: What kind of virtualization does small and medium-sized enterprises need? (1)

With the deepening of virtualization technology in data centers, small and medium-sized enterprises seem to be isolated and helpless. As the license cost of enterprise-level server virtualization products in the IT environment is high, is IT really necessary to deploy virtualization for small and medium-sized enterprises that store a few servers? This question has always been an unavoidable problem for small and medium-sized enterprises.
 
For small and medium-sized enterprise users, the benefits of virtualization are obvious. First, the efficiency of device use is improved, the cost of hardware investment is reduced, and the complexity of device management is simplified, this greatly reduces storage management and operation costs. In addition, IT is worth mentioning that IT departments can configure one or more devices as reusable resource pools to achieve centralized resource management and sharing, improve resource utilization efficiency, and automate supply.

Since there are so many benefits of virtualization technology, why are small and medium-sized enterprises failing to get a good application in virtualization because of technical barriers or scruples in improving the IT adaptability of enterprises? As long as small and medium-sized enterprises find out the charm of virtualization technology, such concerns will be solved.
 
What is the charm of virtualization technology?
 
As far as the core platform server is concerned, a virtualized server product is like a multi-functional platform. you can install any operating system required for your business and configure the network, install the required full set of application software. For example, if you purchase five Windows 2003 licenses for five new servers and plan to invest in the infrastructure, you will probably spend 10 thousand to 10 thousand US dollars in license fees. With virtualization technology, you only need to purchase a Windows Server 2003 R2 license, get up to four virtualization instances, and then install four virtual operating systems for free.
 
In fact, small and medium-sized enterprises will think how to bring all the potential of these systems into play? This is a so-called concept of integration. It gathers all traditional application software and places it on a server with several virtual instances. Through virtualization, it makes full use of existing Server resources, it not only reduces costs, but also effectively integrates servers in your application scenarios.
 
However, users familiar with it architecture will understand that in the traditional open system environment, the host system has its own storage resources, each system administrator needs to control the allocation, use, and management of storage resources for each system. In addition, each server also has a separately configured and managed file system. This low usage causes enterprises to spend a lot of extra costs to meet storage resizing needs.
 
Therefore, the charm of virtualization technology lies in this. With the continuous development of storage technology, storage virtualization technology is truly open. In a virtual storage environment, storage will become transparent to users, users do not have to worry about the functional differences, capacity, device types, and manufacturers of storage devices. All devices will be managed in a unified manner. Storage Virtualization is no longer unfamiliar to small and medium-sized enterprises, it can effectively serve and accept enterprises.
 
Here, the benefits of virtualization are obvious. When servers, storage, and network devices are integrated into multiple resource pools, enterprises can get a higher IT investment return by improving asset utilization. SMEs can also increase deployment flexibility, quickly respond to peak demands, and re-allocate resources when demand decreases. Especially in the existing IT environment of enterprises, there may be many places where enterprises can concentrate resources to achieve the advantages of virtualization.