No Guarantee of Success for Microsoft's Hyper-V Virtualization - Why Use Virtualized Servers?
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Hyper-V brings several capabilities to enterprises that once were only dreamed about. While these capabilities can be attributed to most high-end virtualization solutions, Microsoft is making additional noise in the form of marketing. That should help to wake up additional enterprises to the benefits offered by a virtualized server environment. Let’s take a look at the primary advantages:

• Increased server utilization. It's not unusual for a server to run at about 10 percent utilization. By running several virtual servers on a single machine, organizations can run far fewer servers at 60 or 70 percent utilization.
• Reduced power and cooling costs. Electricity costs are becoming a very significant part of total data center costs. By running fewer physical servers at higher utilization rates, significant power savings can be made.
• Reduced hardware costs. Fewer servers means less machines to maintain and replace.
• Increased agility though faster provisioning. A virtual server can be created from a template in a matter of minutes whenever required, either by IT staff, or by end users if self-service provisioning is available. By contrast, purchasing, building and provisioning a physical server may take days or even weeks to complete.
• Increased reliability and reduced downtime. Virtual machines running on failing hardware can be moved to new host hardware in a matter of moments. Both virtual machines and physical hosts can be failover clusters nodes.

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Any one of the above stated benefits will be enticing fodder for those looking to improve their server operations in the enterprise. By peppering those indicators with facts directed at a specific customer, Microsoft’s partners should be able to pave the way for adoption of Hyper-V solutions and the hardware and services associated with building out virtual server environments. 

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