Why virtualize?
June 20th, 2007 10:20am ilya.m
Discover the Value of Virtualization
Virtualization is a technology that can benefit anyone who uses a computer. Millions of people and thousands of organizations around the world—including all of the Fortune 100—use VMware virtualization solutions to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of their existing computer hardware. Read below to discover how virtualization can benefit your organization.
Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software
- 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.
- Physical Infrastructure Cost Reduction: With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. 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.
- 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.
- 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
The Need for x86 Virtualization
Virtualization was effectively abandoned during the 1980s and 1990s when client-server applications and inexpensive x86 servers and desktops established the model of distributed computing. Rather than sharing resources centrally in the mainframe model, organizations used the low cost of distributed systems to build up islands of computing capacity. The broad adoption of Windows and the emergence of Linux as server operating systems in the 1990s established x86 servers as the industry standard. The growth in x86 server and desktop deployments has introduced new IT infrastructure and operational challenges. These challenges include:
- Low Infrastructure Utilization. Typical x86 server deployments achieve an average utilization of only 10% to 15% of total capacity, according to International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research firm. Organizations typically run one application per server to avoid the risk of vulnerabilities in one application affecting the availability of another application on the same server.
- Increasing Physical Infrastructure Costs. The operational costs to support growing physical infrastructure have steadily increased. Most computing infrastructure must remain operational at all times, resulting in power consumption, cooling and facilities costs that do not vary with utilization levels.
- Increasing IT Management Costs. As computing environments become more complex, the level of specialized education and experience required for infrastructure management personnel and the associated costs of such personnel have increased. Organizations spend disproportionate time and resources on manual tasks associated with server maintenance, and thus require more personnel to complete these tasks.
- Insufficient Failover and Disaster Protection. Organizations are increasingly affected by the downtime of critical server applications and inaccessibility of critical end user desktops. The threat of security attacks, natural disasters, health pandemics and terrorism has elevated the importance of business continuity planning for both desktops and servers.
- High Maintenance end-user desktops. Managing and securing enterprise desktops present numerous challenges. Controlling a distributed desktop environment and enforcing management, access and security policies without impairing users’ ability to work effectively is complex and expensive. Numerous patches and upgrades must be continually applied to desktop environments to eliminate security vulnerabilities.