More Efficient Virtualization Management: Templates

Many IT departments have looked to hardware virtualization solutions such as VMware and Xen to solve server sprawl. Hardware virtualization consolidates servers and helps to solve the hardware and infrastructure costs, but it can create a new problem "OS or VM sprawl". Any hardware virtualization server contains an OS in each virtual machine as well as the host OS (even a 'Hypervisor" is a Linux-based OS). Also, virtualization makes provisioning a new OS instance so easy that administrators deploy more detailed and customized OS environments. As a result, administrators must manage hundreds of VM images with many copies of the operating system and IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Server and other middleware that have to be updated independently.