VMware White Paper Sample

As of the end of 2004 , the worldwide customer base of VMware had grown to over 10,000 server customers, with more than 70 percent of the ESX Server user base reporting use in production with a variety of workloads. Based on this experience, VMware has observed that customers typically start by implementing virtualization as the basis for one of the following solutions:

• Server consolidation and containment
• Disaster recovery and business continuity
• Enterprise hosted desktops

Over time, customers tend to branch out in their use of virtualization, to the point where it becomes a standard part of the production data center infrastructure. This standardization on virtual infrastructure provides tremendous value to the customers, because it enables greatly improved resource utilization, superior manageability and flexibility, and increased application availability. Standardization on virtual infrastructure is also the basis for utility computing.

These benefits are not achieved through the hypervisor alone. The essential function provided by a hypervisor is the partitioning of a single physical server. While important, partitioning is but a small subset of the functionality required for production-grade solutions based on server virtualization.