Are you a small business owner who wants to expand but dreads the costs of new hardware? Or do you work for a larger company, where the server room has become an expensive hot mess that everybody avoids like the plague? Server virtualization can help you. More and more companies, large and small, realize what significant benefits come from server virtualization. Why? Well simply put, server virtualization enables intelligent usage of IT resources.

How server virtualization can benefit you

With server virtualization you’re able to:

• Reduce hardware cost by up to 50%
• Reduce operational cost by up to 70% (energy bills, space leasing etc)
• Save space (no more crowded server rooms needed)
• Increase capacity without more hardware
• Eliminate downtime due to hardware maintenance
• Reduce recovery process to hours instead of days
• Deploy machines much faster by imaging instead of building from scratch
• snapshot feature that lets you save the state of the server in case you need to restore it later on.
• Manageability of virtual servers is also easier because you can easily connect to the servers console remotely without the need for special remote access hardware like HP’s ILO.
• Increase quality and consistency
• Enhance security and reduce risk
• Move resources more quickly

What is server virtualization?

Server virtualization enables you to run multiple virtual machines simultaneously on a single physical server. What that means is that instead of having ten physical computers sitting in a room, you have ten virtual machines residing on a single physical server. Anything you can do with a physical machine you can do with a virtual machine. The only difference is that you can’t touch it. Did you realize that many computers operate at only 10-15% of their total computing capacity, leaving IT resources untapped and unusable? With server virtualization you can increase utilization to as much as 85%. That’s intelligent usage of IT recourses! Server virtualization allows us to reduce human capital and datacenter space.

Get more out of your IT investment

Needless to say, when you get higher performance out of your purchased hardware, you get your ROI back in a few months. In addition, you save money on physical hardware, physical space and space management, and on energy bills.

More flexibility, virtually no downtime

If you need to fix a problem on one virtual machine, you can move data from that virtual machine to another, without having to shut anything down. Thus, you can eliminate downtime due to hardware maintenance. With server virtualization you’re also able to reduce the recovery process to a few hours instead of days, or even weeks. And instead of building machines from scratch, which is necessary with physical computers and takes a long time, you simply deploy new machines by imaging.

Isolation and no interruption

Each virtual machine is isolated from other virtual machines on the same server, as if they were physically separated. This means that if one virtual machine experiences problems, it will not affect the other virtual machines on the server. 
In the event that the underlying hardware itself experiences performance or availability problems, virtualization provides the ability to migrate live applications automatically from one physical server to another with no interruption in service. This capability holds enormous advantages over physical infrastructures when it comes to backup and recovery.