The Move From Physical To Virtual: Page 3 of 3

It's also important to understand the licensing requirements of your software vendors. Most offer CPU-based licensing, but they may factor in extra costs for virtual servers. Virtualization makes it easy to add new servers, but software vendors may want to charge extra for each server added.

Our virtual infrastructure has generated several benefits for Transplace. Not only did we save on hardware costs by decreasing the number of CPUs we needed, we also addressed the challenge of how to create databases when we need to. Virtualization also solved the challenge of how to copy to our disaster recovery server, and we can now create additional environments on-demand--without having servers specifically reserved for each environment. Our virtual machine clusters might run test virtual machines one day and load testing the next, or they could be running disaster recovery. We can choose which virtual machines we want running at any moment in time. This helps solve the challenge of scalability, since we can simply add new servers to the cluster whenever we want. Most importantly, virtualization has allowed us to maintain our 24/7 functionality, hosting, availability, and reliability for our customers.

Vincent Biddlecombe is CTO of Transplace, a provider of transportation management services and logistics technology.