Why Use Virtualization

Virtualization is unquestionably one of the hottest trends in information technology today. This is no accident. While a variety of technologies fall under the virtualization umbrella, all of them are changing the IT world in significant ways.

In layman terms means to make one physical server do the work of many. If you have four servers installed that are only 20% laden and you remove three of them and assign all the work to one, it means Virtualization.

Most organizations explore virtualization for one of the following reasons:

1. Server consolidation: By consolidating multiple server instances on one set of hardware, efficiency is gained by more fully using the hardware. This also results in power saving costs.

2. Application Migration: Some applications do not run on newer server operating systems, creating a need for the ability to host virtual instances of legacy operating systems to run these applications.

3. Increase IT Agility: Provide the ability to rapidly add and move servers to respond to changing business needs.

4. Software Development: By saving and restoring a set of template virtual hard drives (VHD), developers can rapidly cycle through test scenarios during software development processes

Benefits of Virtualization

1. Lower number of physical servers - you can reduce hardware maintenance costs because of a lower number of physical servers.

2. By implementing a server consolidation strategy, you can increase the space utilization and power efficiency in your data center. The bottom-line is savings resulting from power consumption and cooling by as much as 80%. Fewer physical servers are significant for most organizations but is particularly important to those with big server farms, tight IT budgets, limited power supplies, or any combination of the above

3. By having each application within its own "virtual server" you can prevent one application from impacting another application when upgrades or changes are made.

4. You can develop a standard virtual server build that can be easily duplicated which will speed up server deployment.

5. You can deploy multiple operating system technologies on a single hardware platform (i.e. Windows Server 2003, 2008, Linux, Windows 2000, etc).

6. By taking advantage of server virtualization you can easily improve the efficiency of your Data Center, as well as lower your cost of ownership