Server partitioning offers a number of distinct advantages to information technology departments. For one thing, it allows systems administrators to consolidate multiple applications into one physical server box, which helps to centralize management, save space and potentially lower administrative and management costs. Partitioning is also advantageous in multitier application environments, such as enterprise resource planning or data warehousing, where the applications are often functionally divided across multiple desktop clients, application servers and database servers. Partitioning technologies allow administrators to host these applications on different partitions within a single server, thereby improving performance.
Some vendors implement physical partitions, where resources are divided along hardware boundaries.
And some use a bit of both. Physical partitioning involves the ability to take a single large server and divide it into multiple smaller systems, with each partition running its own copy of the operating system. The boundaries can be reset at any time. This once required users to bring the system down, but it can now be done while the network is running. Software-based, or logical, partitions are more flexible because the boundaries between them aren't physically defined.