Virtualization is a tried and tested technology which is revolutionising the way that IT departments deploy and manage their servers.

By breaking the traditional model whereby one physical server runs one operating system, Virtualization allows you to run many servers on one physical computer. This leads to many benefits.

Benefits

• Consolidating many physical servers to fewer virtual servers results in savings of hardware and warranty costs, less server room or rack space occupied, and less power and cooling costs.
• Virtualization offers the ability to test new software, patches and updates on an exact replica server before deploying them on the live server.
• Virtualization offers the ability to create disk snapshots and if required, roll a server back to that snapshot.
• Virtualization makes it easier to enhance Disaster Recovery and High Availability.
• Virtualization supports high server up-time. When multiple virtual servers are implemented it is possible for one physical server to be stopped for maintenance while all virtual machines are kept running.

• Virtualization makes to easier and simpler to provision new servers, in fact a new server can brought online in minutes compared to the days required to order, build and install a traditional server.
• Virtualization allows you to easily fine tune the processor and RAM allocated to each virtual machine. This can be done manually or even automated in a load balancing cluster of virtual servers.