Virtualization Essentials

Building a New Virtual Machine

Once they experience the benefits of consolidation in a data center, administrators quickly look to expand the use of virtualization to increase those benefits. As you saw earlier, containment is the practice of initially deploying new application workloads as virtual machines. One large benefit of a containment strategy is a significant decrease in new hardware acquisition costs because most incoming workloads are now deployed as virtual machines. Some necessary workload-configuration education occurs during this process.

When physical servers are purchased for new applications, their configuration is based on a number of assumptions. The first assumption is how long the server will be in use. A typical server’s ...