Virtualization had also transformed Datacenters into a more software defined environment in which operations had become more automated, greener and easier to manage (Exhibit 5).
With virtualization physical servers could also be configured into a cluster (more than one physical server where virtual machines could be hosted) which allowed scalability and redundancy when a physical box would fail (See Exhibit 6). When upgrading virtual machines, it could take less than 3 minutes for the system to reconfigure itself. Virtualization of physical server hardware was also the back-end for Cloud technology, providing resources for people to request servers, applications and databases without the need to purchase hardware.
Virtualization also ensured that administration became more centralized and simplified. Provisioning times of servers were decreased as compared to physical provisioning. The possibility of improved disaster recovery was improved and simplified.
The evolution of virtualization had opened much opportunity for many companies in utilizing their hardware more efficiently and saving costs within data center environments. Broadly speaking, that the benefits of virtualization were characterized as …show more content…
Related to downtime, systems virtualization enabled rapid recovery from any outages or hardware failures. This reduced the loss of revenue that a business could suffer due to extended outages. Reduced downtime, however, depended upon the correct procedures being in place. Where virtual machine migrations were implemented, faster recovery from hardware problems could be ensured. (erbs, n.d.)
Scalability of computing could be achieved, since virtual machines could have hardware upgrades performed online and physical servers could be removed from the cluster while virtual machines were migrated to other physical servers. When performance capacity from a hypervisor became heavily utilized, virtual machines could be automatically migrated to other hypervisors, which belonged to the same cluster, to address the performance needs that virtual machines demanded. The cluster itself could also be expanded by adding more hypervisors when needed. (Sahoo, Mohapatra, & Lath, 2010, p.