Many technology announcements promise huge cost savings and dramatically increased productivity but unlike most, virtualization actually delivers. 

It's a hot space. The adoption rate of enterprises is soaring in use by 97% of the Fortune 1000.  Virtualization has been in use by most business applications for some time. It has not been widely used in telephony and UC until relatively recently because of the unusual demands of real time communications.

Most vendors now offer some type of virtualization solution. Quite simply, the economics are so powerful that having these capabilities is becoming tablestakes.  On the surface, most of the virtualized solutions appear to offer the same advantages, unfortunately that is not always true. 

Why are organizations using virtualized infrastructure?  Because it offers:

• Lower capital expenditures (Capex) are required by consolidating and reducing the total number of servers needed, the consolidation of storage, reducing network ports and cabling requirements. More applications can be added without having to add servers.
• Lower operating expenses (Opex) result from fewer rack and floor space needed for equipment.  Most importantly, having few servers means less power is required and reduced cooling requirements. The energy costs of running servers in data centers may be higher than the server acquisition costs and is an important site location factor when establishing a data center. Virtualization really helps reduce operating costs.
• Lower management expenses because there are fewer "real" servers to manage.  As an example, hardware upgrades are easier because an application residing on a server can be easily moved to another server while work is being done,  It is also a faster process with less downtime of the application because it eliminates the steps of powering down a dedicated server, upgrade the hardware, verify that everything is working and then powering it up again are avoided.
• Reduce Backup and Recovery Time because virtual machines are basically files sitting on a server that are already backed up and accessible from other machines. Virtualization software has the tools to back up and restore files in a less time-consuming fashion than it would be to repeat this process on several individual machines.
• Redeploy maintenance dollars into new business applications is now possible. Most organizations are spending a majority of their IT budget on maintaining legacy systems. By having fewer dedicated servers and their costs, funds are freed up to be deployed into revenue and/or productivity enhancing applications.
• More efficient business continuity and better disaster recovery planning is possible. Business continuity is improved since organizations can quickly move virtual machines in the event of a hardware failure. Disaster recovery planning is easier because virtualization allows the workload of the entire group of servers to be easily shifted to another location.

Obviously these are very compelling value propositions. In addition to the above benefits, virtualization should support improvements in business process integration, make for a better user experience and increase enterprise revenue. With these goals in mind you should be asking yourself the following questions:

• Is the solution truly virtualized? Surprisingly, some vendors say they offer a virtualized solution but what they really mean is you have to buy their server and can only put their solutions on it. The economic advantage of virtualization is the ability to co-reside the telephony and Unified Communications applications with other enterprise applications on any hardware platform.
• Can you use all of the Virtualization tools (VMWare dominates the virtualization market)  to manage your infrastructure? Companies like VMWare have developed powerful tools so that users can take advantage of all the benefits that we have described here. To limit the use of these tools only shortchanges you.
• Is the telephony and Unified Communications Architecture open and standards based? A virtualized solution into your data center demands flexibility so that it can be applied appropriately within your environment.
• Does the solution allow multi-vendor support? It is important to be able to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions. Many vendors are using virtualization as one more way to lock in their customers into yet another walled garden.
• Can you take advantage of seamless integration with UC solutions and data infrastructure components from other vendors? It is important to be able to choose best of breed solutions that best solve your needs. Unfortunately, some vendors are using this another way to lock their customers into a walled garden.

If you would like to learn more about this subject please call us. CommuniTech Services offers Mitel® and VMware® mission-critical voice applications that can be virtualized alongside other enterprise business applications in the mainstream data center. Mitel has an extensive portfolio of unified communications features that can run as virtual appliances on VMware vSphere™ 4 virtualization platform.