What is the purpose of using Virtual Machine in a professional setting?

I actually VMare but on my own personal use. But I'm curious of what do firms use VM for?

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If we weren't making use of virtualization for our servers we'd need a hell of a lot of rack space for all of the servers we run.

mikeybikes

What company doesn't use virtualization? That's the better question.

cyberguypr

In a nutshell, here are the benefits:
- Going green: save on power and cooling. Less equipment means less heat produced and less power consumed
- Smaller footprint - like Codeblox said, you can have hundreds of virtual servers taking the same space as just a few physical hosts
- Quick provisioning - using templates, you can quickly deploy new instances of any given OS
- Easier backups/DR - leveraging snapshots, replication, etc.
- Hardware abstraction - no vendor lock-in. You can have Dell servers, replace them with HPs, and the VMs will not care
- Great scalability - you can grow independently whatever your contention point may be: network, compute, storage

iBrokeIT

s-n-c-godfather wrote: »

I actually VMare but on my own personal use. But I'm curious of what do firms use VM for?

VMware is a company, not a product. My guess is you are using VMware Workstation (or a similar type of product) on your desktop. Companies will run VMware ESXi between the hardware and virtual machine OS for the reasons listed above in Cyberguypr's post. VMware Workstation and ESXi are two completely different products.

ande0255

I use a VM at my job so I can VPN into a customers network on the guest OS, without taking down the IP applications on my machine (web, email, IM), as some customers have their VPN locked down so tight I can only access the Unified Comm servers or whatever else my company manages.

Outside of the whole server virtualization thing, I've found this to be a very practical day to day use for the average multi-tasking troubleshooter and his VM

(And I actually use virtualbox at work, VMware for my nested lab at home)

BradleyHU

CodeBlox wrote: »

If we weren't making use of virtualization for our servers we'd need a hell of a lot of rack space for all of the servers we run.

/thread

Nutsacjac

s-n-c-godfather wrote: »

I actually VMare but on my own personal use. But I'm curious of what do firms use VM for?

Saves a bunch of money. Less machines, less cooling, less space needed...... you get the drift

puertorico1985

I use VMWare/VBox when I am working with suspicious files. It's not often, but if something comes in and I am not sure what it is, I run an already configured virtual machine, and mess around in there. When I am done, I simply blow away the VM.

Params7

I work for a company that makes its own sharepoint server based software. All the tech folks train on VMs on their desktops.

MAC_Addy

Even a small company ~2,000 people will need many, many servers. I think a lot of people looking on the outside in think that companies don't use very many servers. For the company I work for, using VM's has saved us A LOT of money. Using 1 VM host server to run multiple instances will reduce a lot of rack space, along with many other factors that I don't want to type

pamccabe

I use it to build images that our company uses to roll out computers. It is very easy and convenient.

mikeybikes

MAC_Addy wrote: »

Even a small company ~2,000 people will need many, many servers. I think a lot of people looking on the outside in think that companies don't use very many servers. For the company I work for, using VM's has saved us A LOT of money. Using 1 VM host server to run multiple instances will reduce a lot of rack space, along with many other factors that I don't want to type

This. Our company of ~500 people has 50 servers at the primary colocation site. If we couldn't virtualize, we probably wouldn't have near that, but it would still be a lot of rack space. Instead, it all consolidates to 4U of servers, and 7U of storage.

Plus, our virtualized infrastructure gives us the ability to handle hardware failures and makes backups much easier.

We are even looking at virtualizing some of our physical network infrastructure next year, such as our two load balancers and an SBC.

We have a tremendous level of flexibility that we would not have had with everything being physical machines.

W Stewart

mikeybikes wrote: »

What company doesn't use virtualization? That's the better question.

What companies use virtualization for, not who uses virtualization is a perfectly valid question. It's something I was curious about myself before I started working in a data center with servers and learning the bigger picture of how a IT infrastructure works.