Why virtualize

Skip to primary navigation. Skip to secondary navigation. Skip to page content. Sign out Sign in to online tools UVic Search. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Technology Careers Basics. When physical servers have problems, need routine maintenance, or require upgrades, the result is costly downtime. With virtual servers, applications can be readily moved between hosts to keep everyone up and running.

And when problems do occur, the centralization provided by server virtualization enables easier identification of trouble spots. Lowered capital and operational costs. A highly compelling reason why virtualization is being embraced by many organizations is the positive effect on the bottom line.

Server virtualization allows for savings in multiple areas, such as management time, new equipment expenditures, data center floor space, and energy usage. This ability leads to many very important capabilities such as the ability to take a system snapshot before installing new software, changing configurations or patching, which allows for extremely rapid rollbacks should anything go wrong.

This seemingly minor feature can lead to big peace of mind and overall system reliability. It also makes testing of features and rolling back or repeated testing very easy in non-production environments. This allows for operating system agnostic backup mechanisms and backups that include the entire system storage pool all at once.

Image backups allow for what were traditionally known as bare metal restores, which allow you to restore the entire system to a fully running state without additional interaction easily and very quickly. When available, image-based backups allow for extremely rapid recovery at speeds unthinkable with other backup methodologies. Restoring systems in minutes is possible, from disaster to recovery! The ability to treat virtual machines as files at least when not actively running provides additional benefits that are related to the backup benefits listed above.

Namely the ability to rapidly and easily migrate between physical hosts and even to move between disparate hardware.

Traditionally, hardware upgrades or replacements meant a complicated migration process fraught with peril. With modern virtualization, moving from existing hardware to new hardware can be a reliable, non-destructive process with safe fallback options and little or possibly even zero downtime!

Tasks that are uncommon but were very risky in the past can often become trivial today. Often this is the true benefit of virtualization and abstraction mechanisms. It is not, necessarily, to improve the day to day operations of a system but to reduce risk and provide flexibility and options in the future.

Preparing for unknowns that are either unpredictable or are simply ignored in most common situations. Rarely is such planning done at all, much to the chagrin of IT departments left with difficult and dangerous upgrades that could have been easily mitigated. There are many features of virtualization that are applicable to only special scenarios. Many virtualization products include live migration tools for moving running workloads between hosts, or possibly even between storage devices, without downtime.