Virtualization is here today and its impact on data centers and desktops is profound.

Now more than ever business and IT leaders are faced with the challenges of delivering cost-effective and resilient IT infrastructure that must nimbly adapt to the business. The only certainties most businesses face are uncertainty and change (okay, and taxes). Increasingly, business operations and the applications they rely on are running around the clock. This incredible pace and constant change, not to mention customers - both internal and external, demand higher levels of responsiveness and availability from IT infrastructure than ever before - all this, of course, at lower costs than ever before. Server virtualization is entering the mainstream of business computing precisely because it can help in today’s IT world of feverish change and decreasing budgets.

Virtualization was introduced in the 1960s on mainframe hardware but only recently has emerged to address the vast quantities of highly underutilized x86 servers. These servers are seemingly everywhere - from data centers to hall closets, and they typically house just one application. Virtualization helps solve this costly epidemic of excess capacity by turning one server into ten or twenty by separating the server’s software - its operating system and applications from the underlying physical hardware. This abstraction is possible for desktops and servers and applies to various compute layers including networks and storage. Virtual infrastructure refers to the abstraction of a complete system and its services. Hardware is managed separately from the operating system and applications as a single pool of processing, storage and networking power, which can be dynamically allocated to various software services. In a virtual infrastructure, users see resources as if they were dedicated to them and the administrator manages and optimizes resources globally across the enterprise.

Cost savings are hard to ignore and this is often the first or foremost reason companies virtualize their IT infrastructure. Simply put, virtualization allows users to get much more value out of physical computing resources. Consolidating x86 servers drive up utilization rates from the usual 5-15% to 70-80%. Virtualization takes advantage of the significant oversupply of hardware that is sitting idle. Consolidation also has a trickle-down effect to other hardware and operational cost savings. For e.g., consolidation reduces power, cooling and real estate costs and requires fewer networking switches and cables. Cost savings from virtualization can be significant. 

Even with more utilized physical resources, virtual infrastructure can respond much faster to the business. Virtual machines, which are captured in hardware-independent software files, are inherently more flexible. The results are compelling: new server provisioning and change requests measured in minutes and dynamic workload migration between physical servers with no end user impact are just two examples. The result is increasing flexibility for IT and higher service levels for the business.

Business continuity has become a vital ingredient of IT strategies in a world where businesses rely on IT services 24 hours a day. Whether planned or unplanned, service disruption can be expensive and often fatal to a business. The vast majority of downtime is planned and can be eliminated with virtual machines since they can be moved dynamically from one host to another without service interruption. Unplanned downtime, though much less common, can be very costly for businesses to overcome (if they survive at all).