Virtualisation
Multitasking
- Energy Savings- Fewer physical servers mean less electricity to run the servers and the air conditioning.
- Scalability- Deploying or eliminating servers no longer requires purchasing or repurposing hardware.
- Disaster Recovery- Store an image of your server operating system and configuration on an external drive.
Resources
One benefit that comes with using virtual servers is that it hides the server’s resources, such as the operating system, processors and the number and identify of physical servers.
Virtualisation- Advantages & Disadvantages
Similar to other options for computer systems, there are both advantages and disadvantages to server virtualisation. Some of the advantages to server virtualisation are that it saves time, money and electricity in addition to taking up less space, easier for moving locations and recovery in the event of a disaster.
The biggest disadvantage to using virtual servers is that if the the servers were to go offline then all of the services hosted by the server will also go down. This can be prevented by setting up a cluster of servers. Other disadvantages include increased use of RAM, difficult indirect access to to some hardware, e.g. USB, and the need for the virtual servers to be monitored.