Reasons for Moving to Virtualization

Part of the Virtualization For Dummies Cheat Sheet

If you’re trying to decide if virtualization is right for your organization, whether from an economic or technological standpoint, consider these reasons for taking the virtualization plunge:

It saves money: Virtualization reduces the number of servers you have to run, which means savings on hardware costs and also on the total amount of energy needed to run hardware and provide cooling.
It’s good for the environment: Virtualization is a green technology through and through. Energy savings brought on by widespread adoption of virtualization technologies would negate the need to build so many power plants and would thus conserve our earth’s energy resources.
It reduces system administration work: With virtualization in place, system administrators would not have to support so many machines and could then move from firefighting to more strategic administration tasks.
It gets better use from hardware: Virtualization enables higher utilization rates of hardware because each server supports enough virtual machines to increase its utilization from the typical 15% to as much as 80%.
It makes software installation easier: With software vendors tending more and more towards delivering their products preinstalled in virtual machines (also known as virtual appliances), much of the traditional installation and configuration work associated with software will disappear.