A virtualized infrastructure can benefit companies and organizations of all sizes. Virtualization greatly simplifies a physical IT infrastructure to provide greater centralized management over your technology assets and better flexibility over the allocation of your computing resources. This enables your business to focus resources when and where they're needed most, without the limitations imposed by the traditional "one computer per box" model.
What does it all mean? In the computing realm, the term virtualization refers to presenting a single physical resource as many individual logical resources (such as platform virtualization), as well as making many physical resources appear to function as a singular logical unit (such as resource virtualization). A virtualized environment may include servers and storage units, network connectivity and appliances, virtualization software, management software, and user applications.
What's a virtualized server?
Basically, a virtual server, or VM, is an instance of some operating system platform running on any given configuration of server hardware, centrally managed by a virtual machine manager, or hypervisor, and consolidated management tools.
Note: The software providing the virtualization is called the VMM (virtual machine monitor) or hypervisor. A hypervisor can run on bare hardware (native VM) or on top of an operating system (hosted VM).
A single instance may operate in isolation or share resources with several other instances of the same (or separate) server platforms.
VMware and Microsoft provide a few of the most popular virtualization software products, although open source solutions are also available.
What are the primary benefits of using virtualization software?
Virtualization software enables you to create VMs that share hardware resources and transparently function as individual entities on the network. Consolidating servers as VMs on a small number of physical computers can save money on hardware costs and make centralized server management easier. Server virtualization also makes backup and disaster recovery simpler and faster, providing for a high level of business continuity. In addition, virtual environments are ideal for testing new operating systems, service packs, applications, and configurations before rolling them out on a production network.
Note: Some companies even deploy virtualization of call centers or help desks, greatly reducing costs for those services.
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