1. Consolidation

Combine 10 or more servers into one. Not only do you save a bundle in hardware costs but you’ll see tremendous gains in performance easing server management.

2. Energy Efficiency

Less hardware means less power consumption. One of the main reasons many top enterprises have been able to cut their power costs so dramatically over the past few years is virtualization.

3. Resource Utilization

“There are a couple of ways to measure server utilization. There are servers that sit idle waiting for useful work, and then there are servers running applications that are no longer needed or used by an organization and are considered orphaned or abandoned. The abandoned application can be moved to a virtual machine, the server decommissioned, and the space, power and cooling capacity recovered to support additional growth.

4. Management

In order to reduce complexity and risk while improving productivity, an organization should manage physical and virtual environments holistically together in the same way. Management is a key component of a converged infrastructure – ensuring that customers can move beyond server virtualization with confidence – and to extend its many benefits across the data center.

Even though virtualization adds another layer of abstraction between hardware and applications/data, resource management is dramatically simplified compared to the physical environment.

5. Provisioning

Virtualization presents two key challenges as it applies to application management — understanding the impact of resource sharing and ensuring that adequate resources are provided to support existing and new application workloads. The key to streamlining application environments is to first determine how the four core resources — CPU, memory, disk and network — support applications in the context of meeting performance, availability and service level objectives. Next, organizations need to understand the relationships and interactions between all the components in the virtual infrastructure and how the applications leverage them. Finally, with these dependencies understood, IT teams need to monitor the performance of each component supporting the application while correlating that data so that it’s consumable by service owners and others in IT management.” – John Newsom, vice president and general management of application management at Quest Software.

What once took hours can now be done in minutes. Not only can new servers be brought online quickly, but they can be broken down, rearranged, reassigned and redeployed to suit the needs of the moment.

6. Resource Allocation/Load Balancing

“Virtual servers that are well-managed provide customers with a “fluidity” of resource pools that enable rapid response to varying workload requirements. This results in a reduction in operating costs and increased productivity, allowing organizations to focus on services that deliver business value and not just keeping the lights on in the data center.” – Jeff Carlat, director of partner and platform software, infrastructure software and blades, HP Enterprise Business.

The ability to shift virtual machines around opens the possibility to redirect data loads according to business needs rather than IT requirements. Loads can be balanced evenly over multiple physical locations, or concentrated on just a few, so idle machines can be powered down.

7. Automation

“Through a seamless automation platform, companies are able to leverage the benefits of virtualization as well as execute faster provisioning of infrastructure or applications. Automation solutions can replace labor-intensive processes with consistent, automated workflows that can save thousands in workflow costs and reduce the risk of error.” – Jeff Carlat, director of partner and platform software, infrastructure software and blades, HP Enterprise Business

Your ability to automate many of the more tedious jobs of IT management is greatly improved because virtual resources now reside in the more ethereal software realm. In fact, tasks like data mapping, mirroring and backup will have to be automated because the virtual environment is so fluid.

8. The Cloud

Once you’ve gone virtual within the data center, it’s only a matter of time before you extend those capabilities to the outside world. Whether you opt for internal, external or hybrid cloud services, none of it is possible without the ability to virtualize physical resources.

9. Disaster Recovery

A virtual environment can be up and running much faster than a physical one. As long as physical infrastructure is intact, provisioning and automation systems can have service restored in a matter of minutes. Not only does this improve recovery point objectives, but it lowers the overall cost of getting back on your feet.

10. Storage, Networking, the Desktop and Beyond…

Once virtualization has been introduced to the server farm, similar principles can be applied to the storage farm, I/O infrastructure and the desktop. The idea of creating many out of one promises to extend efficiency and boost performance across a wide range of systems, resulting in a leaner, meaner data center.

By virtualizing servers, you can address the problems with underutilized and difficult-to-manage hardware, excessive power consumption, and the expensive space required to house servers in datacenters and branch offices.  To learn how Realmind Technology can help you save money, call us 312-725-9430 or email us realmind@realmind.com today!

Source: www.itbusinessedge.com