#virtualizing

The benefits of virtualizing your IT environment are numerous, in this three part series of articles we take you through a few of the main points that highlight the benefits. From cost savings and management to growth and environmental factors, all of these are highlighted and are proven benefits of virtualizing your IT environment. Without the expertise and experience, setting up your virtualized environment can be complicated and if not done right can cause ongoing issues. If your company is planning on going down this path, System Architects’ dedicated team can assist with all aspects of the process from what you require to the ongoing management of your new IT environment.

Growth

One of the biggest issues small and midsize businesses encounter is growth. Growing your business is complicated, time consuming and expensive. Having the right policies and procedures in place can eliminate some of the hurdles but there are underlying infrastructure issues you will encounter that can be costly. Small and midsize companies benefit from their flexibility, this flexibility becomes more difficult as your company grows. Virtualizing your environment not only helps to create some of your policies and procedures it can increase your company’s growth potential without losing the flexibility and cost effectiveness. Being able to deploy quickly and expand and contract as needed are key strategies in any growing business. Virtualizing allows you to leverage your infrastructure and allows any growth either by adding additional virtual servers as needed or in the event your physical environment can’t handle the growth going to a cloud is made a lot simpler in a virtualized environment.

Isolation

Isolating certain application can benefit the performance of your entire environment. Having your file server, exchange etc. running on bare metal can cause issues with your server’s performance. Isolating these and allocating the appropriate resources can increase performance not to mention if there is an issue with your file server like the infamous crypto locker it won’t affect the performance of your exchange server.

Multiple OS

Having the ability to run multiple versions and flavours of OS like Ubuntu or Windows Server, reduces the burden on your environment, not to mention the cost for licenses. With this type of configuration you can have multiple virtual servers running and if you are a fan of Linux OS, you can reduce your licensing costs.

Higher Availability

Virtualizing your IT Environment while not a fully high availability solution does provide some additional uptime that you would not normally have if your environment rests on the bare metal. Having reduced downtimes is always a goal when it comes to your business. You can calculate how much it costs your company when your IT environment is down. While you have longer uptimes this does not replace a business continuity plan.

A wise db admin once told me Oracle's current licensing strategy is set up in such a way to be cumbersome towards any other virtualization platform other than it's own. 

Apologies about the bias in the title, its not biases if your visualization centric - it is if your a weblogic (oracle) fanboy

Lets start with the facts:

Every Oracle customer shares a common challenge how to avoid over- or under-licensing.

In a recent survey, 53 percent of enterprises indicated that a portion of software license spend is associated with applications that are overused and therefore out of compliance.1 At the same time, a large percentage of organizations also overspend – owning Oracle licenses that are not used or not deployed for maximum benefit.

Now knowing that we are faced with the tedious implication of licensing the actual application, to maximize their 'compliance' we have to manage and almost require an entire team dedicated to licensing.

Any Oracle licensing strategy is a complex calculation based on current and projected usage. It’s not enough to count database server CPUs, the number of users, or even installations. While these metrics are important, especially for processor-core based agreements, Oracle requires detailed accounts of what is being used – which includes editions, versions, and any options and management packs. The burden is on the organization to keep licenses aligned with actual usage.

Actual usage can often vary dramatically from the projections used when entering into an Oracle contract – particularly for growing companies. Oracle provides assistance in making usage calculations, including scripts for tracking software usage. However, the onus is on the company to maintain license compliance, and many organizations simply do not have the processes or infrastructure in place to meet the reporting requirements of Oracle contracts – so they are at high-risk of expensive over-utilization adjustments in the event of an Oracle license assessment or audit.

While usage tracking is central to managing audit risk, tracking can also address under-utilization – finding Oracle licenses that could be redeployed for maximum usage. This frequently happens when organizations buy and install large quantities of Oracle database Options, but never actually deploy these Options. The process to determine Option utilization is much more complex than simply confirming installations. The process requires detailed analysis of each individual database Option through SQL queries and applying the appropriate business rules.

Good morning read on virtualizing unified communications.

In short, virtualizing voice and other real-time applications is not only practical, it makes good technical and business sense.