Virtualization For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Making a Business Case for Virtualization

In This Chapter

• Finding out why a business case is important

• Showing how virtualization both saves money on hardware and reduces hardware risk

• Making the case for virtualization's more efficient use of IT personnel

• Touting the link between virtualization and lower IT operations costs

• Checking out virtualization's track record in terms of using less energy

• Discovering a virtualization business case gotcha: Software licensing

If you're reading this book, you're probably pretty excited about — or at least interested in — implementing virtualization in your organization. After all, who wouldn't be interested in solving the following problems?

• You're drowning in servers. With the proliferation of cheap hardware and the increasing move to digitization of business processes, IT organizations have increased the overall number of servers in their data centers. Because most organizations follow the “one application, one server” guideline, this means many, many more machines to keep track of. Many organizations find that they're out of room in their data centers, and the cost of increasing the amount of space available isn't anything remotely like the cost of buying a new server; data centers start at millions of dollars and can run upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars. Virtualization, by breaking the bounds of “one application, one server” and enabling multiple servers to run on a single piece of server hardware, reduces server sprawl.

• You ...