$$SWYNK$$
Are You Virtual?
This is an old topic. Surveys and questionnaires abound for longer than a decade regarding the adoption of virtual operating systems and services.
I’d like to revisit the topic as the game has changed considerably over that last few years. Most servers, even the low end servers for departmental or small business use, ship with 64bit processors having 2 or more cores. Memory has become rather inexpensive in comparison.
With the ability to use a virtually free host operating system such as Linux, the licensing costs for virtual machines has fallen.
Virtual machine performance has improved as well. Many software packages are built making virtual machines easy to manage, balance, failover, and much more.
Even the cost of a SAN, providing sharable disk storage, has been reduced to fit into the pocket book of smaller businesses.
Now the benefits of virtual machines are within reach of the budget of a smaller business; a business that wouldn’t even consider virtual machines in the past.
So, why would a small business consider their own virtual machines? Would the money be better spent in a cloud infrastructure? What additional benefits are they gaining? Does the virtual environment provide adequate performance?
I know that years ago (1990) we always ran virtual machines on our mainframe, even at an annual $50K per virtual machine operating system license fee. The benefits exceeded the cost. Do those same benefits work today? How big does a company have to be to experience benefits of a virtual machine?
Well, I planted the seed. Let’s see if the topic is relevant to you. Send your thoughts and experiences to expand on this discussion. Reach me at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
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