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.
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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Microsoft Partner 
