3. Hardware Advantages of Virtualization

Once a server has been “virtualized”, it’s existence is now equivalent to just a file and can be relocated to almost any piece of hardware you please.  So if your “host machine” has a hardware failure, you can simply move the “Virtual Machine” to another host and users will not be the wiser – but for the small amount of down time needed to bring the VM up on an alternate host.    

Now however, if you take that über-server cluster we discussed earlier and used it as your virtual server host system,  all the VM’s running on it will benefit from the ultra-reliability of that impressive hardware array.  Down time can be completely eliminated for hardware failures if set up “Fault Tolerance” which automatically maintains the VM operation even if you lose an entire node, and users will be none the wiser.