What is Virtualization?

Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute.

Today's powerful x86 computer hardware was originally designed to run only a single operating system and a single application, but virtualization breaks that bond, making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time, increasing the utilization and flexibility of hardware.

Virtualization is a technology that can benefit anyone who uses a computer, from IT professionals and Mac enthusiasts to commercial businesses and government organizations. Join the millions of people around the world who use virtualization to save time, money and energy while achieving more with the computer hardware they already own.

Discover the Value of Virtualization
Virtualization is a technology that can benefit anyone who uses a computer. Millions of people and thousands of organizations around the world-including all of the Fortune 100-use VMware virtualization solutions to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of their existing computer hardware. Read below to discover how virtualization can benefit your organization.

Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software

• Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Optimization: Virtualization makes it possible to achieve significantly higher resource utilization by pooling common infrastructure resources and breaking the legacy "one application to one server" model.
• Physical Infrastructure Cost Reduction: With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.
• Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness: Virtualization offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance.
• Increased Application Availability & Improved Business Continuity: Eliminate planned downtime and recover quickly from unplanned outages with the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service.
• Improved Desktop Manageability & Security: Deploy, manage and monitor secure desktop environments that end users can access locally or remotely, with or without a network connection, on almost any standard desktop, laptop or tablet PC.

The VMware Approach to Virtualization
The VMware approach to virtualization inserts a thin layer of software directly on the computer hardware or on a host operating system. This software layer creates virtual machines and contains a virtual machine monitor or "hypervisor" that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple operating systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer without even knowing it.

However, virtualizing a single physical computer is just the beginning. VMware offers a robust virtualization platform that can scale across hundreds of interconnected physical computers and storage devices to form an entire virtual infrastructure. VMware's customers have harnessed the power of virtualization to better manage IT capacity, to provide better service levels, and to streamline IT processes. VMware has coined a term for virtualizing the IT infrastructure - the virtual infrastructure.

What is a Virtual Infrastructure?
In essence, a virtual infrastructure is a dynamic mapping of physical resources to business needs. While a virtual machine represents the physical resources of a single computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the physical resources of the entire IT environment, aggregating x86 computers and their attached network and storage into a unified pool of IT resources.

Structurally, a virtual infrastructure consists of the following components:

• Single-node hypervisors to enable full virtualization of each x86 computer.
• A set of virtualization-based distributed system infrastructure services such as resource management to optimize available resources among virtual machines.
• Automation solutions that provide special capabilities to optimize a particular IT process such as provisioning or disaster recovery.

By decoupling the entire software environment from its underlying hardware infrastructure, virtualization enables the aggregation of multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks into shared pools of resources that can be delivered dynamically, securely and reliably to applications as needed. This pioneering approach enables organizations to build a computing infrastructure with high levels of utilization, availability, automation and flexibility using building blocks of inexpensive industry-standard servers.

Virtual Infrastructure Benefits
VMware has made it possible to fully realize the enormous benefits of virtualization in production-scale IT environments by building virtual infrastructure automation and management capabilities around a best-in-class hypervisor. In fact, 86% of VMware customers use virtualization in production and 43% deploy most new production applications in virtual machines.

VMware virtual infrastructure solutions are ideal for production environments in part because they run on industry-standard servers and desktops and support a wide range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructure. We have designed our solutions to function independently of the hardware and operating system to provide customers with a broad platform choice. As a result, our solutions provide a key integration point for hardware and infrastructure management vendors to deliver differentiated value that can be applied uniformly across all application and operating system environments.

Customers who have adopted VMware's virtual infrastructure solutions have reported dramatic results, including:

• 60-80% utilization rates for x86 servers (up from 5-15% in non-virtualized PCs)
• Cost savings of more than $3,000 annually for every server workload virtualized
• Ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks
• 85% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime

The StarPoint Technologies Difference
Virtualization essentially lets one computer do the job of multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments. Virtual servers and virtual desktops let you host multiple operating systems and multiple applications locally and in remote locations, freeing you from physical and geographical limitations. In addition to energy savings and lower capital expenses due to more efficient use of your hardware resources, you get high availability of resources, better desktop management, increased security, and improved disaster recovery processes when you build a virtual infrastructure. We sincerely hope you will consider VMware's virtualization solutions where ease of management, cost reduction, application availability and improved business continuity are key qualifications for your environment. With deep experience in VMware solutions, StarPoint Technologies is uniquely qualified to answer any questions you may have and we look forward to sharing our experience and customer success stories with you.

Thank you for your interest and we look forward to speaking with you in the near future.