Through virtualization administrators can centrally manage hundreds of virtual machines hosted across several individual servers instead of the traditional “one machine, one server” approach. This greatly decreases the number of physical servers to maintain in the data center and reduces the cost of overhead for power, cooling and data center space.  It also provides the benefits of operational automation, resource optimization and high availability not found in traditional “physical” servers. Virtual machines can be provisioned, configured, started, stopped, deleted, relocated and remotely accessed with keyboard and mouse control via a Window client application or using a web browser with access to the administrative network.  

Virtualization allows for very granular resource management, allowing it to share the resources of a physical server running virtual machines to maximize server utilization while ensuring virtual machine isolation. Virtualization also acts as a resource multiplier, allowing a 4-way server with 32GB of memory to boot 32 virtual machines from a storage area network that collectively think they have 64 GB of memory, 32 virtual disks and 64 virtual network cards. Taking advantage of the fact that workloads are sometimes idle and that different applications are bound by different hardware resources (i.e., some applications are memory bound, some are CPU bound) and that peak usage occurs at different times for different workloads. Virtual machine resource allocations can be established with minimum, maximum, and proportional share amounts for CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth, allowing applications to safely use greater physical resources periodically without requiring a constant allocation.