Here at PEI we are incredibly fortunate to have a stable of World Class engineers. This group is extremely passionate about technology and they are constantly evaluating, learning and playing with the latest and greatest product releases. One of the biggest game changers in recent history has been virtualization. This technology has had a tremendous impact on the IT world in recent years. Here is a list of just a few of the benefits of a virtualized environment ; reduced energy footprint, smaller data center footprint, ability to provision servers more quickly, improved disaster recovery, test lab environment and an easier transition to the cloud.
May organizations have seen the immediate benefits of virtualization and gone through the process to consolidate their servers. Most organizations recognized an ROI on this conversion very quickly. They were able to reduce their maintenance and support fees on the physical servers, most companies realized a significant energy reduction as well as gained efficiencies in spinning up new servers. Many organizations are now looking into additional benefits beyond just the initial server consolidation. For some the next step is taking advantage of their virtualized environment to architect High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions for their organization. Others are now investigating virtualizing their business critical applications.
Virtualizing your business critical applications provides many benefits, including high availability, fault tolerance and disaster recovery, all for you most mission critical applications. One of the more common critical applications that many organizations are beginning to virtualize is SQL. Below is a great blog from VMware on best practices for virtualizing SQL. If this is something that your organization is considering PEI is happy to discuss this process. PEI is one of only a handful of organizations throughout the country with the VCBA (Virtualizing Business Critical Applications) certification.
The following best practices for virtualizing SQL can provide useful guidance for virtual CPU, virtual memory, networking and storage setup:
Jon Eyberg, PEI
