The Benefits of Virtualization

There has been a lot of vibe around virtualization in the computing world over the recent years. In a nutshell, virtualization is the hosting of multiple virtual environments within a single hardware platform. This trend that is sweeping the IT trends has allowed many companies to tremendously cut down on hardware, data centers, operation, management and maintenance costs. In a non-virtualized environment, the average utilization of servers is 5-10%. These servers are barely being used and 90-95% of the environments are simply not being utilized. Virtualization thus allows the use of these physical environments to run separate and isolated operating systems and applications.

What are the benefits of virtualization? Virtualization allows for the reduction of existing infrastructure which results in the reduction of related costs such as power, cooling, rack space etc. Virtualization also allows for server containment which results in infrastructure unification. Hardware costs are thus deferred as well as offering basic component level resource management which is becoming increasingly important in today’s complex and heterogeneous data center environments.

In addition to the above, virtualization has also changed how clients provision their applications and server environments. In a non-virtualized environment, it usually would take a number of weeks to procure the hardware, install the operating systems and patch them and deploy the applications and perform configurations. In a virtual environment, all of this is done in software and only takes a few minutes to initiate. While it is true that virtualization has been around for decades, the dynamics of what is being delivered has changed dramatically and will affect how virtualization will be deployed by organizations.