Many small and mid-size companies are already reaping the benefits of virtualization in a relatively short amount of time. The key to their success was to add new servers incrementally. Ron Whitling, a systems engineer at a payroll outsourcing company, began using virtualization in 2004.

Although hesitant at first, Whitling soon realized how well it was working for his company. From then on, all the companies’ subsequent servers have been virtual. The company now has a total of 50 servers that run on 32 hardware boxes. While 29 boxes are physical servers, four virtualized boxes host 21 virtual servers.

Virtualization is what makes this possible. It allows more than one (virtual) server to run on a single physical computer. As IT manager at Own Bird Law Corp Stephen Bakerman explained, "To virtualize a physical server, you take another server that is normally used for another app; load on a virtualization program, then [load] a program like Virtual Iron that allows you to emulate little compartments on the physical server. You take the simulated computer and load your OS on it, and it runs in its own world independent of the other OSes that are also running on that box. Think of virtualization as creating little compartments on the physical server: One might run Windows, another may run Linux. If one compartment gets corrupted, nothing else is affected."

With so many servers and so much payroll data on them, it was imperative for Whitling that they could easily retrieve data should one of the servers have a problem. Virtualization makes it much easier to pull data up from a storage area network because all they have to do is pull it up onto another virtual server. This is key when it comes to backup and disaster recovery.

The success of this story is not only how virtualization has helped Whitling’s company thrive, but also the ROI he has seen. His company has saved at least $7,000 alone from not having to purchase hardware. The development team has also benefited because they often need a staging area. “We need four servers for development and four for staging. We couldn’t do that with physical servers because the cost would be prohibitive. With virtualization, we were able to do it all with one physical server VMware,” said Whitling. Perhaps he was uncertain about virtual servers in the beginning, but his success now is real.