Linux System Administration

196

|

Chapter 9: Virtualization in the Modern Enterprise

• The need for staff to specialize into functional areas where you will find a lack of

documentation and high levels of personnel turnover

• The need to train and support users and administrators and keep software up-to-

date

Now you might understand why enterprise virtualization has gained popularity and

become one of the few areas where technology can change the business landscape.

With virtual images, you can easily compress your data together with all the pro-

grams, configuration settings, operating system libraries, and other metadata that

make a whole system. Restoring an image restores the system exactly as it was run-

ning at the time, thus making it easier to reproduce documents. Virtualization has

the following benefits:

• It replaces wasteful arrays of systems with fewer, better-utilized systems.

• It simplifies administration, because separate kernels with one application run-

ning on each are more secure and manageable than one kernel running many

applications. It also maintains the environment in which documents were cre-

ated, to meet regulatory requirements.

• Reduced hardware and complexity allows reduced staff.

• Virtualization may help reverse the trend of server sprawl.

High-Performance Computing

Linux has become the preferred host operating system for virtual machines because

of its ability to run and manage massive PC