The availability of affordable, robust virtuali-zation solutions for the x86 platform has brought this technology to the forefront in the last few years. The benefits virtualization brings to server consolidation, higher server utilization, disaster recovery, high availability, easier management and backup and improved security will continue to drive adoption of virtualization technology, along with the savings in physical space and the reduction in power consumption. In spite of the great value that virtualization can provide, there are challenges. The ease and flexibility in creating virtualized servers has been effective in consolidating where servers are located, but has, at the same time, led to explosive growth in the number of servers in use. As the number of servers has grown exponentially, so has the configuration complexity within an IT environment. Successfully consolidating physical servers into a virtual environment requires careful planning, accurate documentation, intelligent decision-making and ongoing management of die changes in your physical and virtual infrastructure. Enterprise organizations looking to capitalize on virtualization should invest in an automated solution that can collect enterprise-wide configuration data and generate the detailed reports necessary for effective capacity planning prior to migrating servers from a physical to physical or physical to virtual environment. Solutions should also be capable of providing ongoing enterprise-wide visibility into configuration changes in both the physical and virtual environment.
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