Exploring Why Companies Adopt Server Virtualization

Companies adopt virtualization for a number of reasons. As stated previously, virtualization helps to consolidate infrastructure, which can lead to a number of business benefits including decreasing the costs associated with maintaining a lot of servers. Virtualization is appealing to companies for technical reasons, too, including the fact that it might help in business continuity, disaster recovery, and resource availability. We delve into some of these benefits in the following sections.

Why companies adopt server virtualization

Companies find virtualization attractive for a number of reasons:

Consolidation efficiencies: Migrating physical servers to virtual machines reduces the number of physical servers and the costs associated with maintaining them. Virtualization improves space utilization in data centers, and on the application side, helps to remove application compatibility issues because applications are isolated on virtual machines. Since there are now more applications on a machine, this virtualization helps to more fully utilize servers.

Cost reduction: Combining server virtualization and consolidation boosts resource utilization, and a consolidated data center reduces power requirements. A smaller energy footprint reduces costs.

Faster server provisioning: Companies can develop one standard “golden” (the reference standard) virtual server build that can be rolled out across multiple servers as needed.

Increased availability: Virtualized servers offer features that often aren’t found on physical servers. These features may include distributed resource scheduling, live migration, and fault tolerance, which helps to keep the servers running.

Business continuity/disaster recovery: Virtualization abstracts (suppresses the details and provides only the relevant information) away the underlying hardware requirements, which can help with disaster recovery because you don’t need to worry about having the exact machine on hand if disaster strikes. The costs savings associated with fewer servers also means that more money is available for disaster recovery plans.

Abstracting hardware assets

Another benefit of virtualization is the way that it abstracts hardware assets, in essence allowing a single piece of hardware to be used for multiple tasks. Here are some of the hardware abstraction types:

File system virtualization: Virtual machines can access different file systems and storage resources via a common interface.

Virtual symmetric multiprocessing: A single virtual machine can use multiple physical processors simultaneously and thus pretend to be a server cluster. It can emulate a fairly large grid of physical servers.

Virtual high-availability support: If a virtual machine fails, that virtual machine needs to automatically restart on another server.

Distributed resource scheduler: You could think of the scheduler as being the super-hypervisor that manages all of the other hypervisors. This mechanism assigns and balances computing capability dynamically across a collection of hardware resources that support the virtual machines. Therefore, a process can be moved to a different resource when it becomes available.

Virtual infrastructure client console: This console provides an interface that allows administrators to connect remotely to virtual center management servers or to an individual hypervisor so that the server and the hypervisor can be managed manually.