Virtual v’s Physical Appliances – 4 Compelling Reasons for Change
Scalability and Mobility - part V
Mobility is a difficult problem to solve. Most often, the solution is to duplicate the data sets on the old server and the new server over a period of time. Mailboxes must be migrated in their entirety, including any hidden extras such as personal blacklists, personal whitelists, filter rules and so on. Sometimes the application will provide tools for exporting and importing the data sets, but again this can raise issues unless the new appliance has an identical release of the mail software or at least a mechanism for realigning the data sets between versions.
Being able to encapsulate the entire email antispam and antivirus appliance into a single image makes mobility and scalability a relatively trivial exercise. The image is simply "removed" from the old virtual server and redeployed on the new one. Within minutes, the user community is accessing their email on the new server using the same password and same features as always.
