According to a recent report it would seem that SMB’s are catching on to the benefits of virtualisation technology, with a staggering 70% of small companies, saying they are using them to move servers from hardware to software in order to increase efficiency, whilst cutting maintenance costs. A recent interview with APC’s Himanshu Patel, went on to highlight the key consideration that IT departments need to bear in mind.
“Businesses need to introduce less points of failure, and consider how to optimize. This means looking at rack space, cooling and airflow analysis, CPU, power and connection between virtual and the physical”. He went on to say that “Businesses need to be intelligent about looking at the physical supply, as virtualisation can offer up to 30% cost reduction”.
For smaller businesses looking to adopt virtualisation, they might be hard pushed to find the budget to implement the top of the range monitoring applications for their environments. However, it would seem that the likes of Dell have come up with an answer, by way of their award winning Foglight for Virtualisation Free Edition.
Mattias Sundling, Product Evangalist at Dell, with approximately 10 years experience in virtualisation, said “Dell wanted to create a toolbox for VM admins. The ability to access their virtual environment, to see how well it is performing, whilst highlighting issues. The Free Edition, offers a very good starting point, as there is no limitation on the size of the environment or how long you use the free edition. Obviously there are limitations to the free edition, but you will be able to monitor your environment for problems, inefficiencies, misconfigurations and hypervisors”.
Sundling went on to say “[Dells] vision for the free tool was to combine multiple utilities into one toolbox. Allowing business to access their environments in a single dashboard. By utilising this tool, business can see how well their environment is performing. And if they have over allocated resources, by looking at the density of how many virtual machines are running on each host”.
However, whilst the large majority of IT professionals are driven by the promise of between 10% and 30% cost savings and appear all too eager to adopt virtualisation, it would seem that middle management, still need bigger incentives to make the virtual jump.