How to reduce costs with Server Virtualization?

Virtualization is a great solution for businesses when it comes to reducing expenses and increasing effectiveness. With virtualization solutions, organizations can enhance their IT systems and optimize their resource usage. Further in this article you can find different virtualization approaches through which you can improve the recourse use and reduce the expenses of your company.

Server Virtualization: One Machine, Many Servers

Through server virtualization, companies can efficiently consolidate recourses and thus save time and money. This is due to the fact that through virtualization you can reduce the number of physical servers. This in turn makes managing them considerably easier. Additionally, when it comes to Microsoft Licensing, the implementation of fewer servers leads to companies saving on hardware and the maintaining costs that come with them.

Server virtualization is a great solution for companies looking to optimize their IT system. You can, for instance, centralize multiple virtual servers in one physical machine, which streamlines the server workload and keeps hardware costs low. Consequently, the power consumption is also reduced. Your company can create and manage multiple virtual machines simultaneously though well-known hypervisor setups such as VMware, Hyper-V or KVM. Last but not least, since server virtualization dynamically distributes the resources according to the demand, the overall efficiency is boosted and any resource waste is reduced.

Read more about the compatibility between Microsoft licenses and VMware.

From desktops to the cloud: How to reduce costs with virtualization?

In this paragraph you can find different ways to reduce costs and increase your business' effectiveness at different levels.

• Desktop virtualization: Desktop visualization, also known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) centralizes the management of desktop environments by hosting them on machines. This solution eliminates the need for hardware such as desktops and laptops. This further facilitates the implementation of the policy Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). By allowing employees to use their own devices, companies experience not only a higher level of flexibility, but also reduce their hardware expenses. This in turn, considerably saves resources connected to updates and maintenance.
  
  
• Storage virtualization: Storage virtualization includes managing storage resources across physical devices. By implementing storage virtualization companies can more effectively distributes their storage through strategies such as provisioning. Provisioning is used to allocate storage based on demand. This way, the storage costs can be minimized. Another techniques used in storage virtualization is data de-duplication and compression. With these solutions, companies can reduce their hardware needs by freeing up storage space.
  
  
• Network Virtualization: you can use Network virtualization to employ software-defined networking (SDN) and thus create efficient networks. This strategy can help you eliminate the complexity and high costs that come with the physical network hardware. Through the use of virtual network switches, routers, and firewalls, your organization can easily adapt its network infrastructure. This is especially beneficial for businesses that need to meet changing demands without investing in purchasing or maintaining new hardware.
  
  
• Automation: Automation plays an important role in cost reduction through virtualization. You can automate tasks, such as setting up or managing resources. Through automation, you can not only significantly reduce the need for manual work, but you can also lower the risk of mistakes.
  
  
• Backup and disaster recovery: Virtualization simplifies backup and disaster recovery processes. Some efficient techniques of virtual machines are snapshot and cloning. The replication of virtual machines across physical hosts or data centres ensures data availability should a failure occur. Additionally, it minimizes downtime and overall costs.
  
  
• Cloud integration: Hybrid cloud strategies combine the advantages of both on-premises and cloud infrastructures. By adequately managing and distributing the workload between on-premise servers and public cloud services, organizations can reduce their costs while benefiting from optimal performance. Using cloud-based virtualization services also eliminates the need for upfront hardware investments.

Read more about the advantages of virtual machines.

Saving on Microsoft Licensing Through Virtualization

Although virtualization is a great way to save on Microsoft licensing, companies need to carefully plan and implement its introduction to their IT environment. For small businesses, standard Windows Server and SQL Server licenses can be used to keep costs low. Even though virtual machines provide unlimited options, they are not a one-fit solution for every company. We advise you to take your specific software needs and requirements into account in order to best evaluate whether implementing virtual machines is the right solution for your company.

For large(r) organizations, it is generally a good idea to purchase a Windows Server Datacenter license, as it comes with several virtual machines on one server, unlimited virtualization rights, and easy maintenance. Similar to SQL Server Enterprise licenses, you can consolidate multiple databases into a single physical server. This way you can optimize your resources and avoid the additional costs of acquiring a separate license for each virtual machine.

As Microsoft licensing experts, we from Softtrader are here to answer all your questions about virtualization and give you complete answers. We also offer original Microsoft licenses up to 70% cheaper. Contact us to find out how much we can save on your project.

Conclusion

Businesses can optimize their IT infrastructure by implementing various virtualization technologies. Virtualization directly contributes to an optimal resource utilization from server and storage consolidation to flexible networking and simplified management. Additionally, organizations can considerably save costs and increase performance and data security by using automation and cloud services integration.

With more than ten years of experience, Softtrader has been offering pre-owned Microsoft licenses to companies in the European Union such as all versions of Windows Server and SQL Server. Fill out the form below to get in touch with us or if you have any questions regarding how to reduce expenses for your project. We'll be glad to assist you.