As Microsoft Dynamics Customers Upgrade, More Recognize Benefits of Server and Application Virtualization

Whether the economy is booming or tanking, businesses still have the same goals-to get as much for their dollars as possible.

And one way organizations upgrading to the latest versions of Microsoft Dynamics applications can do that is by moving from physical to more consolidated virtualized environments.

"Virtualization means a couple things and what most people think of is Microsoft's Hyper-V and its [competitor] VMware," said Robert Helm, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. "The technology allows you to run applications inside virtual machines that can be moved around among physical machines."

Helm said there are a couple things Microsoft's virtualization technology can do for a Dynamics customers.

"One is just to provide a test and design environment, something a number of Dynamics customers have already been doing with it even before Hyper-V," he said. "Then in production, server virtualization is part of an overall plan of a company typically to consolidate on fewer servers so that they'll get better utilization out of their servers and lower their overall management costs. And that applies to Dynamics equally as well as to any other applications. So Dynamics isn't necessarily the focus of a virtualization project it just gets kind of carried along."

But Helm said the technology is eventually going to become more important because of companies like Avanade that have done a lot with Dynamics CRM in a production environment and are hosting Dynamics applications for external customers.

A good time for companies to move to a virtualized environment is when they're upgrading to a newer version of a Dynamics application, said Christopher Costanzo, IT director,