Posted by As a business owner, you’re constantly looking for ways to maximize efficiency and cut costs. While there are many approaches to consider, virtualization is one strategy that can deliver significant benefits. Virtualization involves using software to abstract computer resources away from physical hardware. This allows a single physical server or desktop to be partitioned into multiple “virtual” machines, each running its own operating system and applications in isolation.
VMware is the leading provider of virtualization solutions, especially for traditional on-premises environments. While virtualization does require an initial investment, it often pays for itself quickly through reduced hardware, electricity and cooling needs.
In this blog, we’ll explore 7 compelling reasons why virtualization with VMware could be worth exploring for your organization.
1. Increased Hardware Utilization
One of the biggest advantages of VMware virtualization is that it allows you to maximize your existing hardware investment. With VMware, a single physical server can run multiple virtual machines, each behaving like a standalone computer. This means you can consolidate multiple aging or underutilized physical servers onto fewer, more powerful systems. Studies show virtualization typically increases server utilization from 10-15% on average to 50–70%.
2. Improved Flexibility and Scalability
Virtualization gives you a whole new level of flexibility and scalability compared to physical servers alone. With VMware, virtual machines are independent of any specific hardware. This means you can easily and quickly move VMs between servers as needed for maintenance, upgrades or load balancing. You can also copy VMs for testing, development or additional capacity with just a few clicks.
- This level of mobility allows you to continuously optimize resource utilization. Servers that were once rigidly partitioned can now flexibly allocate CPU, memory, storage and networking on demand based on real-time workload requirements. Virtual machines can automatically be powered on or off to match fluctuating usage patterns.
- If a department needs additional capacity, new virtual machines can be provisioned in minutes using standardized templates and configurations. There’s no need to purchase new physical servers that may sit partially idle.
- Virtual machines can also be resized non-disruptively using hot-add techniques. For example, you can quickly add vCPUs or memory to a VM experiencing increased load without any downtime.
- VMware virtualization also makes it simple to test applications in isolated virtual test labs before deployment. This lowers project risks. You can easily create copies of production environments for user acceptance testing or software development sprints. Dev/test VMs don’t interfere with production workloads and can be discarded after use.
With VMware, your infrastructure is also better prepared to support growth initiatives. New virtual machines can be added incrementally as your computing needs evolve over time. There’s no need for large, infrequent “forklift” upgrades of physical servers. Virtualization creates a flexible foundation that allows your business to dynamically scale resources up or down as required without major disruption or expense.
3. Simplified Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
VMware includes built-in capabilities to streamline your disaster recovery strategy and ensure business continuity. For example, Site Recovery Manager allows you to automatically replicate all production VMs to a secondary DR site in near real-time. It maintains these copies in an isolated state to prevent interference with the primary site.
- Should your main facility go down, Site Recovery Manager can orchestrate failing over all virtual workloads to the backup location in under an hour. Users remain productive with near-seamless failover and no data loss. With physical servers, transitioning all workloads, applications and data to a new location takes far longer and is more prone to errors.
- Individual virtual machines can also be independently replicated at the DR site for additional protection of critical systems. VMware’s stretched cluster functionality even enables active-active configurations where VMs can run simultaneously in two geographically separate data centers for ultimate resilience.
- Regular disaster recovery testing becomes quick and painless as well. Entire production environments can be quickly replicated at the DR location for validation and user acceptance testing. Once testing is complete, the copies are easily discarded without consuming long-term storage. This ensures your DR plan remains up-to-date and any issues are proactively identified.
Overall, VMware virtualization streamlines your entire backup and recovery strategy through centralized management, non-disruptive replication, automated orchestration of failovers, and simplified testing. This gives you confidence that your business can withstand downtime from any type of disruption, whether anticipated or unforeseen.
4. Reduced Software Licensing and Maintenance Costs
By consolidating your server footprint, virtualization solutions reduce the number of pricey operating system licenses, database licenses, and applications you need to purchase and maintain. It also lowers the costs associated with power, cooling, support and management of physical hardware over time. For many organizations, licensing savings alone can pay for a virtualization project within 2 years.
5. Enhanced Security and Isolation
Virtual machines operate in secure, isolated containers that protect against malware, data leaks and other security threats. Even if one multi-cloud is compromised, the rest of your environment remains unharmed. Virtual machines also make it easy to provision secure baseline configurations and quickly spin up isolated testing and development environments.
6. Simplified Management and Administration
VMware centralized server management, patching, monitoring and other administration tasks. Rather than logging into each individual physical server, you manage your entire virtual infrastructure from a single console. This dramatically reduces the time spent on routine maintenance tasks while improving visibility and control over all resources.
7. Enhanced End-User Experience
With VMware virtualization, end users have a consistent experience regardless of device or location. Virtual desktops and applications can be delivered from your data center to any network-connected device. Users gain a personalized, secure and high-performance digital workspace that follows them from the office to home. This fosters flexibility and productivity for your mobile workforce.
Conclusion
Virtualization delivers compelling benefits for business efficiency, flexibility, security and cost savings when implemented using a robust solution like VMware. By maximizing existing hardware investments, streamlining operations and enhancing end-user experiences, virtualization pays off quickly for most organizations. Its agility also ensures your infrastructure remains optimally tuned to your evolving needs. If you haven’t already, I recommend evaluating virtualization to see how it could benefit your unique environment.