The Console

Posted by Ben Matheson
Director of Small and Medium Business

About a year ago we started focusing more on the needs of small and medium business customers. The reason why we did this is quite simple. We were seeing a surprising number of midmarket and smaller customers adopting virtualization. 70% of downloads from VMware Server (of which we have over two million at this point by the way) were from SMB customers and we have over 10K midmarket or smaller customer adopting VMware Infrastructure (VI3), our high end virtualization product. 

Turns out that the benefits of virtualization are every bit as important to midsize and smaller businesses as they are to the world’s largest enterprises. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say they are even more important in a lot of cases. SMB’s don’t have the challenge of managing thousands of servers but they also don’t have the big budgets and IT staff that the larger enterprises have either. The challenge in midmarket IT is how they meet the demands of the business with very limited resources. And make no mistake their IT infrastructure is every bit as important to their business as it is within a large enterprise. Just because an SMB is smaller doesn’t mean they don’t need the highest levels of performance, availability, security, etc from their software infrastructure. They need all the good stuff that virtualization has to offer.

So why have these SMB’s deployed virtualization?

There is a simple way I like to describe the benefits of virtualization to medium and small businesses. It is what I call “Simplify. Optimize. Protect”. Customers can use virtualization to simplify their overall IT management (save time on management), optimize the use of their hardware assets (save money on hardware), and protect their systems and business critical information from disaster or downtime (save their business).  Let me take these one at a time.

Simplify: “to reduce in complexity”

Reducing the number of physical servers will help you simplify your IT environment but virtualization does much more than that. Virtualization reduces time spent on many of the common IT management activities. First off, our management tool, VMware VirtualCenter, provides a centralized management experience where customers can monitor and manage all their virtual machines and physical resources from the proverbial “single pane of glass”. Customers can also choose to setup alerts or automate routine tasks with task scheduling and alerting.

Second, virtualization simplifies the deployment of new servers. Provisioning a physical server traditionally has been a very time consuming task. First you have to order a server, then you wait until it is delivered, then provision the operating system, then the applications, then the management agents, etc. Provisioning a physical server takes days/weeks. With VirtualCenter a customer picks which virtual machine they want to deploy from a list of templates (such as email template, file server template, etc) and then determines the physical server they want to deploy it on and they are done. Provisioning a server with VirtualCenter can be done in minutes or hours rather than days. Equally as important, a customer does not have to buy a new physical server every time they need to roll out a new workload but rather they can roll out a virtual machine on an existing physical server.

Finally, customers can use VirtualCenter to apply policies across entire farms of virtual machines in a very simple, yet powerful way.  For example, they can apply technologies like VMware High Availability (our availability software solution) or VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (our dynamic load balancing solution) across all his virtual machines very easily. This process is much simpler than other technologies such as traditional clustering technologies which are very difficult to setup and manage.

Optimize: “to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible”

SMB customers consistently tell me they use 15% of less their servers' capacity. The root cause of this waste has been that running multiple line-of-business applications or server applications on the same physical box never really worked because of application and operating system conflicts. Physical systems have largely required a dedicated box for each application. The result is server sprawl. Using virtualization they can consolidate many physical boxes down to fewer physical boxes running virtual machines. In fact we have a great tool for converting physical machines to virtual machines called VMware Converter that you can download for free.  A nice side benefit of consolidating servers is that it lowers cooling, electricity and space costs.

Last week I spoke with a small business that had 3 VMware Infrastructure 3 servers running 15 virtual machines. In the old world he would have had to buy 15 separate physical servers.  I spoke with another company in the process of converting 14 physical servers down to 4 virtualized servers running VMware Server. Same thing – lower costs. Virtualization allows them to optimize the use of their hardware and reduce electricity, cooling and space at the same time.

Protect: “to defend or guard from attack, invasion, loss, annoyance, insult, etc.”

If I had to stack rank the business benefits of virtualization I would say that better data protection, availability and disaster recovery is the biggest reason why SMB’s adopt or are evaluating virtualization. Ultimately the most important thing about disaster recovery and backup and recovery is the speed of recovery. This is where virtualization really shines.  Virtualization packages all the system information and data into a nice virtual machine container which makes recovery very quick. We even have technologies like VMware High Availability (HA) to provide higher availability for the applications running in virtual machines. VMware HA reduces server downtime by automatically restarting virtual machines that were running on physical servers that crashed. VMware HA results in less application downtime and the restart is done automatically without any IT staff intervention.

Technologies like VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) eliminate the need for a backup window and allow customers to backup their systems anytime during the day without impacting their production users.

And finally customers can use virtualization along with replication technologies (either host based or array based replication) to replicate the entire virtual machine to a secondary disaster site. If the primary site goes down, the customers power on the virtual machines on the secondary site and they are up and running.  With virtualization the hardware on the second site does not need to be identical to the primary site. In fact, after a customer consolidates using VMware software they can repurpose some of their older, extra hardware to their disaster recovery site. Whitepapers on the benefits of virtualization on DR can be found here:

More info…..

There is a lot I could say about the solutions we are working on for medium and small businesses but a lot of that will have to wait until another day. If you are a medium or smaller business and are looking for more info you can go to: www.vmware.com/solutions/smb and get more detail.

Thanks and I’ll be blogging soon, 

Ben