Virtualisation

Axia’s Cloud Service offer a comprehensive range of virtualisation solutions suitable for any corporate IT task. We manage a geographically replicated VMware ESX Enterprise system designed for the FTSE 500 but scaled to be affordable for the small – medium business. Our ‘pay as you go’ structure means you only pay for the resources that you need to support your business. Configured for optimum performance and total reliability, a hosted virtual server from Axia is a flexible and cost-effective way to scale your IT environment.

Managed 24/7/365 around the clock by the Axia support team, a virtualisation solution is ideal for any company looking to consolidate existing equipment, cut operational costs and revolutionise the way IT is delivered to the business.

Our approach

We treat virtualisation as a design decision, not a product purchase. Before we recommend a platform, we map the workloads you run today — file servers, databases, line-of-business apps, dev/test environments, remote desktop pools — and work out the compute, memory, storage and network each one actually needs. That sizing exercise feeds into a target architecture covering host sizing, storage tiering, backup and replication, network segmentation and the licensing model that fits your growth pattern. Only then do we build.

What a typical solution includes

• Hypervisor platform — VMware ESXi as the default, with Hyper-V or Proxmox options where the workload or licensing picture calls for it.
• Host hardware — business-class servers with redundant power, hot-swap storage and validated support from Axia engineers. We will specify, source and pre-stage the kit so it arrives ready to rack.
• Storage — SSD-tier performance storage with capacity tiered onto spinning or hybrid arrays where appropriate, sized for headroom rather than just today’s footprint.
• Networking — VLAN-aware virtual switches, segregated management networks, and integration with the firewalls and switches your business already runs.
• Backup and replication — image-based backups with off-site copies and recovery testing on a documented schedule, aligned with your wider disaster recovery plan.
• Migration — P2V conversions, cross-host moves and the application-aware steps that minimise cutover windows.
• Managed operation — 24/7 monitoring, patching, capacity reviews and ongoing change work, provided as part of our Managed Cloud Services engagement.

When virtualisation makes sense

Virtualisation is a strong fit for SMEs that have outgrown a single physical server, want to stop buying hardware every time a new app appears, or are looking to introduce high availability without the cost of a second data centre. It also pays off when the business is paying for server hardware that is using only a fraction of its capacity — consolidation through virtualisation typically cuts physical footprint, power and cooling by 60–80%, while making recovery from hardware failure a scheduled event rather than an outage.

It is less suitable for very small estates where a single modern server is already fit for purpose, and for workloads that are poorly suited to shared infrastructure (certain high-I/O database workloads, for example). In both cases we will say so during the design conversation rather than sell a solution that does not fit.

Hybrid and cloud alternatives

Where the business is moving away from owning hardware altogether, the same design principles apply to Microsoft Azure, AWS or VMware Cloud. Many of our clients end up with a hybrid — on-premise virtualisation for latency-sensitive or regulated workloads, with cloud workloads sitting alongside — and we design the two environments to interoperate cleanly rather than treating them as separate estates.