Virtualization Basics

What is Virtualization?
Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. This leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple environments. Different virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer.

How Does Virtualization Work?
VMware virtualization works by inserting a thin layer of software directly on the computer hardware or on a host operating system. This contains a virtual machine monitor or "hypervisor" that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently. Multiple operating systems run concurrently on a single physical computer and share hardware resources with each other. By encapsulating an entire machine, including CPU, memory, operating system, and network devices, a virtual machine is completely compatible with all standard x86 operating systems, applications, and device drivers. You can safely run several operating systems and applications at the same time on a single computer, with each having access to the resources it needs when it needs them.

What is a Virtual Machine? A virtual machine is a tightly isolated software container that can run its own operating systems and applications as if it were a physical computer. A virtual machine behaves exactly like a physical computer and contains it own virtual (ie, software-based) CPU, RAM hard disk and network interface card (NIC). An operating system can’t tell the difference between a virtual machine and a physical machine, nor can applications or other computers on a network. Even the virtual machine thinks it is a "real" computer. Nevertheless, a virtual machine is composed entirely of software and contains no hardware components whatsoever. As a result, virtual machines offer a number of distinct advantages over physical hardware.

Virtual Infrastructure

What is a Virtual Infrastructure?
A virtual infrastructure lets you share your physical resources of multiple machines across your entire infrastructure. A virtual machine lets you share the resources of a single physical computer across multiple virtual machines for maximum efficiency. Resources are shared across multiple virtual machines and applications.

Reduce Costs with a Virtual Infrastructure
Aggregate your x86 servers along with network and storage into a unified pool of IT resources that can be utilized by the applications when and where they’re needed. This resource optimization drives greater flexibility in the organization and results in lower capital and operational costs.

Decouple your software environment from its underlying hardware infrastructure so you can aggregate multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks into shared pools of resources. Then dynamically deliver those resources, securely and reliably, to applications as needed.

Our customers report dramatic results when they adopt our virtual infrastructure solutions, 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 workload virtualized
• Ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks
• 85% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime

Why Your Company Should Virtualize

Virtualizing your IT infrastructure lets you reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization, and flexibility of your existing assets. Around the world, companies of every size benefit from VMware virtualization. VMware customers typically save 50-70% on overall IT costs by consolidating their resource pools and delivering highly available machines.

• Run multiple operating systems on a single computer including Windows, Linux and more.
• Let your Mac run Windows creating a virtual PC environment for all your Windows applications
• Reduce capital costs by increasing energy efficiency and requiring less hardware and increasing your server to admin ratio
• Ensure your enterprise applications perform with the highest availability and performance
• Build up business continuity through improved disaster recovery solutions and deliver high availability throughout the datacenter
• Improve enterprise desktop management and control with faster deployment of desktops and fewer support calls due to application conflicts

Server Consolidation Reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50% and energy costs by 80%, saving more than $3,000 per year for every server workload virtualized. Business Continuity Planned downtime for hardware maintenance and backups is the cause of most service interruptions. VMware’s server, desktop and application virtualization products let you eliminate planned downtime and ensure data protection.

Simplify Data Protection & Backup Virtualization enables the encapsulation of a complete system into a small set of files. As a result, complete protection of systems, applications and data can be achieved without the complexity of traditional data protection solutions. Systems, applications and data can be protected using a single set of tools and processes. Energy Efficiency VMware monitors utilization across the datacenter and intelligently powers off unneeded physical servers without impacting applications and users. This enables consolidation ratios of 15:1 or more which increase hardware utilization to as much as 85% and reduce energy costs and consumption by up to 80%.

Disaster Recovery VMware lets you recover to any machine, not just specific duplicate hardware, reducing hardware costs and maintenance budget and lowering the complexity of maintaining a backup site. Even if you haven’t virtualized all production servers, virtualize target servers for your data recovery to allow greater simplicity, reliability, and cost savings. Recover from disasters rapidly Ensure reliable disaster recovery Reduce the cost of disaster recovery Automate disaster recovery