With the advance of IT technologies, server virtualisation offers the opportunity to create many virtual hosts on one physical machine, which effectively reduces overall IT cost while increases system availability*. There are a number of benefits to adopt server virtualisation:
- Isolate applications
Traditionally enterprises adopt a “one app/one server” model in order to isolate applications in production environment. But this caused physical server sprawl, increased costs, and underutilized servers. Server virtualisation offers a perfect solution to the above problems: One physical server now hosts as many virtual machines (hosts) as desired; applications installed on each host are totally independent to each other like in the traditional model, while capacity of the physical server is being fully utilized. Another benefit is resources such as CPU, memory can be allocated dynamically to one of the virtual hosts should it require.
- Easy management with few IT support staff
In the tradition model, with more physical servers, the chance of hardware failures increase, backup / recover becomes more time consuming and complex, maintenance/support to applications, operating systems become more challenging. All of those require more IT staff to manage. Once servers are virtualised, the number of physical servers is reduced significantly which effectively leads to easier IT management.
- Increase uptime
Server virtualization offers a number of advanced features that just aren’t found on physical servers, which helps with business continuity and increased uptime. For example live data migration can seamlessly switch to another physical machine when one in the pool encounters hardware failure. The ability to quickly and easily move a virtual machine from one server to another is perhaps one of the greatest single benefits of virtualization with far-reaching uses.
- QA/lab environments
Virtualization allows user to easily build out a self-contained lab or test environment, operating on its own isolated network. One of the greatest benefits is a tailor-designed training/learning environment for internal staff to play with, without worrying production applications could be inadvertently impacted.