Benefits of Virtualization

• Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Optimization - Virtualization makes it possible to achieve significantly higher resource utilization by pooling common infrastructure resources and breaking the legacy “one application to one server” model. With virtualization, capacity can be used more effectively, reducing the costs to acquire systems, the environmental (power cooling and real estate) costs required to run them, and the staff costs associated with managing the additional systems.
• Physical Infrastructure Cost Reduction - With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in your organisation. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.
• Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness - Virtualization offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance. Because a virtual machine's disk storage is usually represented as files or logical volumes, standard storage management techniques such as file copy or volume cloning can be used to create new virtual machines rapidly, rather than requiring real "bare metal" installation of operating systems and applications, as non-virtual use of separate physical servers would require.  This can cut the time to set up a new system (including hardware acquisition and racking, software installation and configuration) from weeks to minutes.
• Increased Application Availability & Improved Business Continuity - Eliminate planned downtime and recover quickly from unplanned outages with the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service. An application error, operating system crash, or user error in one virtual machine will not affect the use of other virtual machines on the same system.
• Improved Desktop Manageability & Security - Deploy, manage and monitor secure desktop environments that end users can access locally or remotely, with or without a network connection, on almost any standard desktop, laptop or tablet PC.
• Increased security - By separating users and applications into different virtual machines, diverse user communities (and, in hosting environments, even multiple customers) can use the resources of a single physical system securely, with their information and network traffic safely isolated from others.
• Portability - The use of abstract devices within virtual machines, combined with the encapsulation of virtual data in file-backed or volume-backed virtual disks, makes it easy to move virtual machines from one physical system to another, for maintenance, more effective resource utilization, or simply for replicated provisioning. In many cases, running virtual machines can even be moved while they are online, with no interruption to service.