23.2 Benefits of Virtual Machines
Improvements in virtualization technology are driving rapid adoption of
virtual machines in data center and branch office environments. Virtual
machines are being used to:
-
Consolidate servers in the data center.
Servers running in the data center are often underutilized. One study
showed that data center CPU time averages about 12 percent of capacity.
By consolidating several physical servers as VMs running on a virtual
machine server, data centers are lowering hardware, maintenance, and
electrical costs.
-
Consolidate and host legacy applications.
-
Isolate applications on the same physical server.
-
Balance the computing load across data center resources.
-
Provide application portability and flexibility across hardware
platforms.
