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CHAPTER 1 PROPOSING VIRTUALIZATION
locations supports the business driver for functionality in the event of a disaster. Windows 2008
R2 and Hyper-V provides an organization with the following benefi ts:
u Ensures continuity or uninterrupted provisioning of operations, servers, and services
u Reduces service interruptions with failover clustering on the host
u Allows almost immediate rebalancing of resources to guest machines to meet growing or
changing business requirements
u Improves disaster response and business recovery requirements by minimizing the infra-
structure necessary to run all mission-critical applications under a recovery scenario
The Technical Case
A virtualized environment increases IT fl exibility because a varied range of resources can be
added, changed, or moved as needed to meet the changes in business demand. Resources can be
scaled to either increase or decrease based on changing workloads and patterns. As a by-product,
virtualization also improves IT’s level of resiliency by simplifying backup, failover, disaster
recovery, and business continuity solutions.
Test and Development
Virtualization can maximize test hardware, reducing costs, improving life-cycle management,
and improving test coverage. Nearly all test and development machines are good candidates for
virtualization, unless you are performing specifi c production workload tests.
Virtualization of the test and development environment allows you to do the following:
u Consolidate hardware resources and better utilize hardware with consolidated workloads.
u Improve and maximize hardware utilization, especially for machines with short lives or
involved in destructive life cycles.
u Reduce TCO for hardware, electrical, cooling, power, and rack space footprint.
u Greatly reduce time to provision new servers (on virtual hardware) to developers as fully
imaged servers.
u Reduce time to migrate new software from development to test to production.
u Increase business agility by moving to a dynamic platform.
u Streamline test and development efforts with multiple iterations of the same basic image,
differencing hard drives, and undo disks.
u Rapidly duplicate a production environment.
u Access operating system and software CD image from virtual media libraries.
u Schedule test environment provisioning.
u Utilize templates to deploy multiple virtual machines at any given time in a single
operation.
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