A surprising large amount of people I’ve talked to lately are not taking advantage of virtualization.  I just have to ask why?  There are so many advantages to it and very few disadvantages.  Even if you work at a small business with less than 25 employees virtualization still makes sense for you.  For those of you who don’t know, ESX is VMWare’s virtualization platform, it is super powerful and XenServer and Microsoft HyperV are playing the catch up game.  ESX is the bar setter. 

Here’s the good news: VMWare made a free version of ESX called ESXi.  This thing has a 32MB foot print.  That’s right the entire OS is 32MB, that’s how small it is.  However it houses some major power.  That same server that is now running your DC for your environment could probably power 10 virtual servers, and you’re DC could be one of them.  Myself and the guys around the office like to show off our mad P2V skills (Physical to Virtual) where we take a physical server and basically copy it to the virtual while it is running!  The best part is this is all done and the users don’t even know anything changed, but the administrators know, and management knows.  Virtualization has HUGE costs savings, and just make administration and backup super easy.

Make the first step and virtualize your datacenter.  After that, we’ll talk about virtualizing your desktops.  Virtualization is an industry wide game changer, if you don’t know it, you need to.