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6. Fast System Communications
Host-to-guest and guest-to-guest communications occur without any hops or standard physical hardware restrictions. Private VLANs create system-to-system communications that are secure and fast. Using a private VLAN for a group of VMs means that you can create a multi-tier application with limited outside network exposure and without a lengthy set of ALLOW and DENY network rules.
7. Easy Decommissioning
To decommission a physical system, you must touch the system multiple times: Turn off network ports, wipe the disks, unplug the system, remove the system from the rack and finally dispose of the system. A VM’s decommisioning process involves the same general steps but there are no steps made to a data center. And, there are no systems to remove or to return. Removing a VM from inventory takes a few seconds.
8. Templating
How many gold disks does it take to support a data center? The answer is, one for every type of new hardware that passes through the magnetically-locked doors. How many Windows Server 2008 R2 VM templates do you require? One. You need one template that contains everything needed for deployment that, incidentally, takes minutes to complete. A template allows to truly create a single master gold disk for your system deployments.
9. Fast Deployment
VMs require no shipping, no installation, no power hookups, no network drops and no SAN cabling. Using templates or staged ISO images, VM deployments take minutes or hours not weeks or months.
10. Dynamic Capacity
How far in advance would you have to plan to scale-up for a major marketing campaign that requires new physical computing capacity? Virtualization allows you to rapidly respond to changing business conditions. You can scale-up when you need extra capacity and scale back when you don’t. Virtualization defines dynamic computing.
Ken Hess is a freelance writer who writes on a variety of open source topics including Linux, databases, and virtualization. He is also the coauthor of Practical Virtualization Solutions, which was published in October 2009. You may reach him through his web site at http://www.kenhess.com.
