Throughout this chapter, you have examined a variety of virtualization techniques. The following bullets summarize a company’s motivation to virtualize:
Increased device utilization (particularly, CPU utilization)
Decreased device footprint
Decreased power consumption
Simplified operating-system and application administration
Ease of software provisioning and patch releases
Device and storage scalability
Increased user access to key resources
Increased flexibility in supporting multiple operating-system environments
Improved use and management of software licenses
Improved utilization reporting, which leads to improved capacity planning
Improved disaster recovery and business continuity
Virtualization also has some primary disadvantages:
New staff or staff training may be required to understand the virtualization process.
Not all applications are well suited for virtualization.
The virtualization process adds slight overhead, which will make some applications run more slowly.