Virtualization Basics: A hypervisor can improve performance of Microsoft Dynamics NAV environments large and small

For businesses large and small, Dynamics NAV has proved itself a capable platform to manage much or all of a business's operations. And with one prominent exception (which we'll get to in a moment), NAV often works best coupled with a virtualization engine - either Microsoft's Hyper-V or the leading competitor VMWare.

Adiraan Van Bauwel is co-owner of SQL Perform Europe in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and his company regularly works with both large and small business running NAV alongside either Hyper-V or VMWare.

Van Bauwel says even today's off-the-shelf computer hardware enables either of these hypervisor products - which, as this virtualization basics series has previously discussed, extends hardware performance by running multiple virtual machines ("instances") per physical box.

"If you buy a physical machine [today], no matter what you buy, you're buying way more hardware resources than you actually need," he says. And because of this continued speedup, Van Bauwel says, businesses may find an increasing incentive to extract as much performance out of their hardware investment as possible.

Mom and Pop Shoe Store Wears Hypervisor

One of Van Bauwel's clients is a three-employee shoe store in the Netherlands, consisting of a husband and wife plus an administrative assistant. This small shop runs its entire business on NAV, he says, using three Hyper-V instances on one physical PC set up in the store's warehouse.

Each of the three Hyper-V instances enable the business to cordon off its business software onto separate "machines" that then can be compromised or slowed down or even ...