Are Virtual Servers relevant for single-host sites?

Hypervisors are great. I work with VMware's vSphere and vCenter all day every day in my life as an IT Infrastructure Engineer. Virtualisation (no, I don't spell it with a 'z', I don't live in the U.S. of A.) is a staple part of most organisations today.

But is it relevant for a small organisation with a single server?

Client B (the second-smallest client I have) is 'little'. A 10-user manufacturing business, they are by far the most formal of my small clients and actually care about their IT systems. But have no doubt, the IT budgets are limited.

A recent discussion with the Managing Director about their IT future highlighted some challenges when designing a solution; in a genuine small business, none of the IT components are optional.

Me: What bits do you need in a hurry to keep the business running? You know, fulfil existing orders and take new ones.
Client: Just email and Exo (a SQL-based accounting system) and the formula documents on the 'S'-drive. And the office phones, but just the main number will do if we can get to voice-mail. And the payroll system if it's a Tuesday. Oh, and the Internet, for banking and stuff. But that's all. We'd have the email on our phones, right?
Me: So.. everything then?

In my experience, a small business is often built around Microsoft's Windows Small Business Server. And for one reason really: Cost. SBS is cheap when compared with the cost of purchasing the same functionality one license at a time (I don't count Open Source platforms, one day I might even explain why). So if your Small Business got on the SBS ladder prior to ~2008, then Exchange, Active Directory, SQL, and a whole bunch of other stuff is likely to be on the one server.

So, back to the original question: is a single hypervisor host relevant in this business? All those eggs, all in the one basket?

My answer is, 100% yes. And here's why; it helps with the costs to the client, while making administration and expansion easier. Win-win.

Microsoft's SBS 2008 and 2011 editions allow you to split your SBS installation onto a second server for the core products, if you have the Premium edition. And you've always been able to introduce a second Domain Controller to an SBS environment, or add member servers to split File & Print or other application-specific services off. Chances are pretty good that there wasn't budget for a second server, but maybe you managed to squeak one in. But at the heart of the system, you still had one main server. Or worse, you had two or three important servers, any of which would be a major problem if it wasn't up and running. So essentially, all your eggs were in the one basket anyway.

Virtualisation adds some bonuses, and given the 'everything in one' thing isn't any more of a negative than we already had, those bonuses are pure wins. Let's list some;

• Snapshots - we can take a quick snapshot of a VM before doing some risky upgrade. Roll-back is now simple if the brown stuff hits the fan. (PS; Don't make snapshots of your AD controller, and roll back to them, if you have multiple AD controllers! More on this another day, just take my word on it for now.)
• Easy remote admin - all hypervisors use some sort of admin console, which exposes power-on/off, virtual media mounting, adding additional disk etc.
• Flexible DR and BCP - your systems are already image files, so you can probably find a machine and a way to boot your existing machines if your main host does go belly-up.
• New things to play with - there are dozens (hundreds? Probably thousands!) of useful Virtual Appliances around, so things that used to be out of the budget may be reasonably straight forward in a virtual environment. Need a firewall but the client won't spring for anything more than a ADSL router with NAT? Try a free firewall appliance. How about a network monitoring system?

In an upcoming post, I'll have a look at the two hypervisors I thought about (VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, and Microsoft's Hyper-V), which one I went with and why.

Cheers,
JS