Most servers are designed to run one operating system and application at a time. Traditionally, businesses would need multiple physical servers to run their various applications, yet each server would often only be operating at five to 15 percent of capacity.
Infrastructure virtualization uses software to simulate the existence of additional servers – creating independent virtual systems within the same physical server – which allows you to run multiple operating systems and applications simultaneously. Each virtual machine is a complete system with processors, memory, networking and storage. This maximizes the use of resources and can reduce the total number of physical servers needed for your business.
Virtualization enables capabilities like high availability of the system, advanced memory and storage management, fault tolerance, disaster recovery and workload balancing.