With server consolidation and virtualization now becoming mainstream, the small enterprise is faced with the question of how to migrate existing blade servers to the new environment. Small enterprises may not have the budget to replace two to four year old blade servers but still want to move to virtual machines as the enterprise processing requirements grow.

By careful evaluation of business needs, application requirements, and blade server configurations, some reasonably inexpensive optimizations can be implemented that can meet the challenge of virtualization. Items to consider include:

• Selecting appropriate virtual machines to share each processor blade.
• Maximizing server RAM.
• Optimizing network and storage access.
• Demanding vendor support for new virtual I/O standards.

By judicious optimization of software and hardware combinations and possible upgrades, the small enterprise can extend the life of existing blade servers and gain the benefits of virtualization.