Virtualization is a trend that is sweeping enterprise IT across the globe. Overall 7 million servers are shipped every year world wide. Out of those 6 million servers are Intel Architecture X86 and these are getting deployed in the enterprise data centres world wide. In a traditional environment there are single application running on single OS on a single machine and they are sprawled across the data centres, this leads to a tremendous cost in the number of areas - in terms of Hardware, data centre facility cost, interms of operational maintainance and management cost.
To address this overwhelming pressures, what enterprise IT has found is the most compelling tool called "Virtualization Technology" (VT). Across these millions of single servers the average utilization is just about 5-10%. This indicates they are barely utilized to its capacity. So what VT does it allows you to take advantage of this under utilized resources as well as the fine granined technology to RUN these envrionments side by side on much lower number of PHYSICAL SERVERS. To illustrate this, we take these environments it could be databases, webservers, e-commerce application, business application and you take them and consolidate them into much smaller number of physical servers. Each of these environment now runs side by side on a single machine and each of them is fully isolated and encapsulated.
What that means is - There is a Hardware Layer and top of it is the "Virtualization Layer" that enables all this and on top of this you have each of these environments whether it is databases,webservers ,business applications etc. They all have their separate operating-system (It coud be UNIX, LInux, Windows, Solaris etc) and on top of this runs each of this applications side by side on the single machine. The most facinating this is that - each of this virtual servers has its own CPU, memory, ethernet Nic, disk. They all run in a isolation just as they would run in a physical enviornments.
What all this means to IT companies is - Tremendous savings. Earlier IT organizations use to run 800 servers for various applications are now able to consolidate that down to just 60 servers. ROI is tremendous.
In addition to that, it also completey changes how customers can provision their application, their server environments. For example - How you initiated new server, new applicaiton softwre earlier...? Putting this out into your data center took number of weeks - to procure the hardware, to install the OS and then patch it with service packs, install the application and confifure that. Phew!!!!
Now all these is a software, hence initiating this is a matter of minutes.
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