For mid-size and enterprise-level businesses, the topic of data center virtualization is becoming increasingly popular. As more businesses shift to an application-based cloud environment, the idea of hefty physical servers that run singular applications is becoming obsolete.
Virtualizing your data center offers a number of benefits, including centralized management of your environment, increased cost savings and flexible scalability.
Centralized Management
In a virtual data center, you have a low number of physical servers that house multiple virtual machines within it. This makes management a breeze, as you can easily access those virtual servers from one management console.
This also makes server maintenance less daunting, as you can easily move the server you’re working on out of production until you’re ready to go live. If you make a mistake, you can quickly restore to a previous snapshot of the device, decreasing critical downtime.
Greater centralized management also aids in more secure disaster recovery protocols. If you encounter critical issues with a virtual server, you can restore from a previous snapshot in a matter of minutes. If it’s an issue with a physical server, you can move virtual machines from one host to another.
Virtualization also makes server backups pain-free. You can easily adjust the frequency of your backups from every day, down to every hour if needed. When setting up new backups, you won’t need to wait hours (or even days) for replication to complete over your ISP trunk, taking the guesswork out of it.
Increased Cost Savings
Adopting a virtual data center is one of the most cost-effective things you can do for your business. Not only will your data center footprint be decreased, but you’ll see a decrease in the amount of labor required to properly maintain your environment.
Because fewer servers are required to host the myriad of virtual servers in your environment, you’ll spend less money on hardware and the networking equipment required to power them. This also means a reduction in the floor space you take up, if you’re hosting your data center at another location. Reduced floor space means a lower monthly bill.
Plus, with solutions like Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), you can cut down on management costs. Because Cisco ACI allows for simplified automation, centralized visibility and even an open source platform for application integration, your engineers will spend less time managing and more time on revenue-generating activities.
Virtual data centers also cut down on the number of physical trips needed to an offsite data center, as maintenance can be done remotely. You’ll no longer need to send resources onsite to resolve critical issues, increasing your uptime and overall profitability.
Scalability
In a virtual data center environment, you can easily scale from a few virtual servers to hundreds with minimal effort. You don’t need to wait for physical hardware to come in before you can build a new server, which saves you time and money. Spinning up a new server or adding resources to an existing one can be done in a matter of minutes, which frees up your engineering team to work on other things, improving overall productivity.
Final Thoughts
Virtualizing your data center is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your business. It will save you time and money, and it offers you the flexibility to scale your environment up or down, depending on your needs.
To learn more, download our e-Book What Is Data Center Modernization?