Applications

Virtualization can be helpful to organizations in variety of ways. Some of the mainstream applications of virtualization are:
1.Server Consolidation
In this, software components of different physical servers, that is operating system and applications are moved to a single physical server. Hence it provides reduction of physical servers leading to reduction in energy costs and capital investment.
2.Extending Life of Applications 
Many applications require an operating system that is not supported by new hardware. Organizations can convert old system into virtual machine which can be run on new hardware.
3.Development and Testing
Virtualization helps in development of distributed applications easier as multiple pieces of hardware need not be installed. Also ability to repeatedly load virtual machine compared to installing software each time speeds up the testing process. Further applications can be tested on different operating systems also. 
4.Failover Management
 
Virtualization software is capable of monitoring the status of guest virtual machines and in the condition of failure guest machine can be quickly restarted. This saves precious server downtime and makes the infrastructure more robust.
5.Load Balancing
Load Balancing refers to the ability of virtualization software to transfer virtual machines from heavily loaded server to a less loaded server. Thus better management of infrastructure can be done with the help of virtualization.
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