Benefits of Virtualization

IT departments are more and more looking for alternatives to reduce the total cost of ownership and increase productivity. However, in the last two decades, x86 architecture based servers have increased their numbers in the IT segment. Indeed, in a traditional x86 architecture, only one or few applications share the same hardware. This meant the multiplication of servers which were each dedicated to a different back office applications (Mail servers, Web servers, Databases, CRM, etc.) to ensure enough resources to handle peak traffic. In most of the cases these applications do not use all the power of the server hardware, which as a consequence causes waste of CPU, memory, etc. Additional servers require more power, cooling, physical space, maintenance, etc. that raises the TCO in data centers.

Virtualization software companies address such issues by offering possible ways to optimize server efficiency. For instance, this can be achieved by sharing hardware resources between virtual machines (guest machine).

In general advantages of virtualization are:

• IT Hardware Consolidation
  • Improve the efficiency and availability of IT resources
  • Reduce capital costs
    • Reduce expenditure on physical servers
    • Maintenance and Hardware savings
• Infrastructure savings
  • Lower power consumption
  • Reduced cooling requirements
  • Decrease physical space requirements
• Increase application reliability
  • Potentially more availability options available
  • Business continuity options

There are also some disadvantages, like:

• Network complexity
• Hardware costs
• Software costs