Benefits of Virtualization

With the cost of servers remaining basically flat, their power and capabilities are ever increasing. This has created a situation where very little of the power and performance of the physical computers is actually used in running the  process or application that has been tasked on that server. It has been shown by several different studies that most modern servers are only running at 2–20% of their capacity. This is an inefficient use of the resources. Businesses want to get a better value for the money they spend on servers.

One of the key benefits of a virtual infrastructure is that all the virtual machines have standard virtual hardware regardless of the physical platform they are currently running on. This feature creates a utility computing environment where virtual machines simply work on whatever physical server the organization chooses. A hypervisor is simply a program that allows multiple operating systems to share a single physical host. Leveraging the advanced features of many hypervisors, an administrator can move running virtual machines to other physical servers without interruption to the users accessing the virtual server. The old physical server can be upgraded, repaired, or replaced, all without changing the virtual machine.

This utility computing feature allows for rapid recovery in case of disaster or security breach in that the virtual server configuration files and virtual disks can be copied or snapshots taken and transferred to a remote facility or separate storage and then used to restart the virtual machine in a different location without regard to drives or physical hardware differences. This feature allows for recovery of virtual machines in minutes instead of hours or days using traditional servers.

There are other side-expenses to consider when determining the value of  virtualization, such as the cost of network ports, power connections, heating and cooling, space requirements, maintenance and upgrades, replacement and disposal of equipment, and the amount of manpower it takes to manage and maintain a physical infrastructure. For the organization, the benefits can be:

1. Reduced cost of hardware
2. Reduced space requirements
3. Rapid deployment of new servers
4. High availability
5. Hosting multiple environments
6. Separation of virtual
7. Ability to maintain a Test/Development Environment in an easy fashion
8. Lower costs for software testing