Given the clear benefits of better performance and cost savings, it's no surprise that businesses are adopting server virtualization to get more out of less. Virtualization basically means inserting a software layer between your hardware and your operating system.

This separates and decouples the operating system from the hardware. That allows you to run many operating systems at the same time on top of that same physical piece of hardware.

"If you look in the past, in the physical world you have this very tight coupling of operating systems to hardware," says John Gilmartin, group manager product marketing at VMware. "That meant most IT organizations would run a single application on top of a single operating system on top of a single server. And as servers became more powerful, they ended up underutilizing those servers.



"If you did an assessment of an average customer's environment, most organizations' servers are running at between five and at most 15 percent utilization," he says. "So they have a huge investment in computing that they just aren’t using."

Read this short paper to learn more about the benefits of switching over from physical to virtual servers. Benefits like cost savings, power savings, space savings, and better overall return on investment.