Why Virtualize?

Throughout this chapter, you have examined a variety of virtualization techniques. The following bullets summarize a company’s motivation to virtualize:

• Increased device utilization (particularly, CPU utilization)

• Decreased device footprint

• Decreased power consumption

• Simplified operating-system and application administration

• Ease of software provisioning and patch releases

• Device and storage scalability

• Increased user access to key resources

• Increased flexibility in supporting multiple operating-system environments

• Improved use and management of software licenses

• Improved utilization reporting, which leads to improved capacity planning

• Improved disaster recovery and business continuity

Virtualization also has some primary disadvantages:

• New staff or staff training may be required to understand the virtualization process.

• Not all applications are well suited for virtualization.

• The virtualization process adds slight overhead, which will make some applications run more slowly.