Some of the most signifcant benefits of virtualisation include:
- Better usage of server capacity. Typical server usage rates can be as low as 5 or 10%. Virtualisation enables managed usage of spare server capacity, reducing systems costs.
- Better usage of storage capacity. Pooling storage can help administrators improve upon the typical 40% to 50% capacity utilisation rates. And where you're mirroring to a secondary site, this can represent significant benefit.
- Saving physical space and energy consumption. Higher utilisation rates equates to fewer servers, in turn reducing physical footprint, power and cooling requirements.
- Ability to deploy a new system without ordering new hardware saving installation, build and testing time.
- Quicker backups. By taking a data snapshot, virtualisation software can eliminate the bottleneck between the application server and backup server.
- Automated management. Automation can include automatic capacity addition if a database is running out of space.
- Application testing. Instead of testing an application against actual production data, you can use virtualisation to create a replicated data set to safely test an application against.
- Application & database performance. Critcal files can be assigned to very high speed storage devices without affecting the function of the application.
- High availability. By separating storage from the application, virtualisation insulates an application from a server failure.
- Resource sharing between heterogeneous servers. A virtualisation engine can ensure that servers running different operating systems can safely coexist.