The adoption of virtualization by corporations is being spurred on by the availability of high performance, multi-core servers that deliver the processing power, memory, and connectivity speeds required to support applications running on multiple virtual machines on a single physical server.

Companies are realizing they can save a great deal of money by virtualizing servers and server applications. In fact, virtualization can significantly reduce the number of physical servers required to run a business, thus cutting the associated long-term costs for management, upgrades, licenses, maintenance contracts, and warranties. Additionally, virtualization makes it easier to provision new servers, roll out new applications, and modify and re-launch existing applications.

Virtualization also helps reduce downtime. The reason is that by running applications on separate virtual machines there is less chance of conflicts or contention for system resources. In many cases, additional savings can be realized in terms of reducing energy requirements to both power and cool the servers since fewer physical servers are required.