Virtualization has been around for a while, but is just now starting to pop-up in the SMB market. Some companies will expand physical servers to assign a single role to each physical server. While that is okay to do, you typical don’t utilize the full power of each server when you do this and you end up paying for more hardware, electricity, and generate more heat in your server room (or IT closet) than necessary. This is where virtualization comes in to play. With virtualization you can logically split a server up to run multiple installs of Windows, Linux, Unix or any combination of those on the same physical server. Each logical install doesn’t see the other logical installs that are on the same server which can help you with software conflicts, virus infections and more.

If you have ever looked in to virtualization you have more than likely come across the company VMWare. While VMWare is one of the biggest and longest running players in the virtualization market, they can also come out to be one of the more expensive. With the price of VMWare’s ESX server, SMB’s typically find it hard to justify the cost of virtualization. That is why I want to tell you about a free alternative from Citrix called XenServer. XenServer is a solid alternative to VMWare’s solutions and comes in three different versions. The version that would best fit a first virtual server for an SMB is free.

If you are thinking that you may need to purchase a new server to implement a new software solution, give me a call to talk about virtualization first. We can talk together to find out if virtualiztaion would be a good fit for you.