Improved performance

Virtualization

Exelos saw virtualization for small and medium size businesses coming over 10 years ago. Now we deploy it often in every size business including our own.

If you’re still not sure what virtualization is, here’s a simple explanation:

  • Today’s computer hardware is very fast and computers often spend a lot of time underutilized literally waiting for something to do.

  • Most users understand that computers typically run a single operating system like Windows, MAC or Linux and the operating system dictates what programs you can run.

  • Virtualization lets multiple operating systems be installed on the same physical hardware with each “virtual machine” able to run simultaneously and independently of the others. This utilizes the hardware better and even lets virtual machines running different operating systems run side-by-side.

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Benefits

  • Improved performance for all virtualized machines. By sharing a much faster more powerful host, most virtualized machines run better than they would running stand-alone on less capable hardware.

  • Faster recovery in a disaster. Virtual machines are not as tightly bound to the underlying hardware. So if your physical hardware fails, it’s pretty easy to boot up your virtual machines on another host. Virtual machines can even be mirrored real-time to backup onsite or offsite hosts for almost instantaneous failover recovery.

  • Primary role and application isolation. It’s always been a best-practice to run each server primary role or application on a separate machine so that you could start, stop and manage them independently without risk of disrupting the others. But doing so used to require separate physical servers for each which was expensive. Not with virtualization! It’s not uncommon to have 5, 10 and even 20 virtual machines all running on a single physical computer which can all be stopped, started, and managed independently.

Benefits of virtualization

These are just a few of the dozens of benefits of virtualization. Many of our local IT competitors don’t seem to understand the value in virtualization for small and medium sized companies and it’s not a fit for every business. But the reality is that if your network supports 10 or more users, you should probably at least consider virtualization as part of your next upgrade.

Exelos has been deploying virtualization favorably to our client base now for years. If your IT provider isn’t at least talking about it, then maybe it’s time for a new IT provider? Call Exelos to learn more!

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