Virtualization: An Overview

Virtualization contributes to higher levels of business continuity in a couple of ways. For example, with the decoupling of software applications, operating systems and hardware platforms, fewer redundant physical devices are needed to serve primary machines. Traditional high-availability configurations often require a 1:1 ratio of primary device to backup device in addition to the 1:1 software to hardware ratio. In the virtualized environment, however, multiple servers can fail over to a set of backup servers. This allows, then, for a many-to-one backup-to-primary configuration ratio, which increases service availability.