Question

The IT department at Universal AreoSpace uses three Windows servers: one for the Accounting Department, one for engineering, and one for the Marketing Department. These servers are running on separate systems that are aging and do not have the capability for future expansion. A suggestion is to save costs by virtualization to consolidate their servers and provide high availability in the event of hardware failure. Write a memo that discusses the advantages and disadvantages of virtualization and discusses which data center virtualization products you recommend and why.

Answer 1

Advantage of virtualization:

• We can run several OS on a single hardware and that actually meets the requirement for an infrastructure.
• Secondly, we can easily create a snapshot of the virtual OS. So, in case of the OS crash, we can get back the OS in the same state.
• We can even copy and move the snapshot to other hardware also and can spin that OS over there.
• We can add resources whenever required without restarting the virtual OS.

Disadvantages:

• Since it utilizes the same hardware, if the hardware fails, none of the OS will run.
• It utilizes the same resources, and running too many VMs can result in performance issue in the hardware.

For implementation of virtualization on an enterprise level, you can use cloud computing or VMware workstation. Cloud is actually a great solution in this case as it allows you to provision resources at lower cost. But if you want to create VMs running on your physical datacenter then VMware is the ultimate solution. You can even opt for Windows server 2012 R2 datacenter edition which can also support many hyper V. so within the Windows licensing only you can create several other Windows OS.