Microsoft Virtual Server Software: Virtualization on industry-standards-based servers very quickly has become a mainstream tool for tackling some of today’s most critical IT challenges. It is helping IT organizations reduce capital and operating costs, simplify and modernize their infrastructure, and respond more quickly to business needs. As analysts from Forrester Research stated in a recent report, virtualization is well past the early-adoption phase, and today’s solutions deliver practical benefits across a wide range of business and IT environments.

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A Perspective by Intel Corporation and Microsoft

Microsoft and Intel are bringing mainframe technology into mainstream computing environments.

Benefits of Server Virtualization

Virtualization on industry-standards-based servers very quickly has become a mainstream tool for tackling some of today’s most critical IT challenges. It is helping IT organizations reduce capital and operating costs, simplify and modernize their infrastructure, and respond more quickly to business needs (Figure 1). As analysts from Forrester Research stated in a recent report, virtualization is well past the early-adoption phase, and today’s solutions deliver practical benefits across a wide range of business and IT environments.

• Cost-effective Consolidation—Multiple OSs and applications can be hosted on each physical server to improve utilization, integration, and manageability.
• Simple Legacy Migration—Legacy applications (and their legacy OSs) can be re-hosted on new servers without software modification. This helps IT organizations reduce cost and risk of infrastructure modernization, and makes it easier to standardize server hardware without limiting software options.
• Faster Provisioning—A new virtual machine (VM) can be configured on an existing physical server in minutes to deploy new applications or increase capacity for existing solutions. Complete software stacks, including state information, can be cloned and transferred across the network as individual files.
• Affordable Disaster Recovery—With virtual machine fail-over to an alternate shared server, it is no longer necessary for hardware at the backup site to exactly duplicate the production hardware. Disaster recovery is simpler and less costly, and Microsoft’s free licensing for standby virtual machines drives down costs even further.
• Streamlined Test and Development—Multiple software iterations, and even entire multitier network environments, can be run on a single physical server. Provisioning and rollbacks are simplified, less hardware is required, and existing systems can be repurposed very quickly as needs change.

Virtualizing with Confidence

Because server virtualization delivers significant benefits when compared to the traditional one-application-per-server approach, adoption rates are increasing rapidly. Yet much can be done to make today’s virtualization solutions simpler, more reliable, and more affordable. Intel and Microsoft have made significant advances, both individually and collaboratively.

With Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 running on Intel Xeon processor-based servers, businesses now can take advantage of an affordable, thoroughly integrated virtualization solution running on the world’s most widely deployed hardware and software architecture. They can manage their physical and virtual infrastructure using familiar tools, and they can count on comprehensive support from both Microsoft and Intel.