VMware vs Traditional IT Infrastructure: Why Virtualization Wins

The new business environment today is a complex and dynamic technological world. The pressure to innovate, cut costs and deliver better services is always there. Although legacy IT infrastructure, built on physical servers and hardware, is inflexible, expensive and complex to manage, it can still be at the same time.

Virtualization is a way for companies to modernize their IT operations. Abstracting compute, storage, and network resources into software-based virtual machines (VMs) of change allows organizations to streamline the infrastructure, automate operations and quickly adapt to changes in business.

In the last two decades, VMware has become the dominant enterprise virtualization platform. By providing its hypervisor, management tools and ecosystem of solutions, VMware is a complete virtualization layer that brings many benefits compared to traditional non-virtualized infrastructure. To understand how VMware's licensing changes impact these benefits, read more.

This article examines the limitations of legacy non-virtualized IT, explains the basics of virtualization and VMware’s solutions, and outlines ten compelling reasons why virtualized infrastructure with VMware wins over traditional IT.

The Challenges of Traditional IT Infrastructure

Before virtualization became mainstream, enterprise IT environments consisted of rows of physical servers running single applications or workloads. While simple in concept, these traditional architectures brought considerable downsides:

1. Inflexible and Inefficient Hardware. Legacy servers can only run one application per machine. Most sit idle, over-provisioned for peak capacity. There is no way to move workloads between servers easily.
2. Complex Dependency Chains. Applications rely on dependencies from multiple servers and operating systems. Changes risk breaking things unexpectedly.
3. Inadequate Disaster Recovery. Backups require regular offline maintenance. Restoring entire physical servers is slow and requires considerable downtime.
4. Difficult Server and Application Lifecycle Management. It requires an extensive manual effort for OS patching, upgrades or migrations with planned downtime.
5. Scaling Requires More Hardware. As the workloads and applications are added, more servers need to be purchased. This leads to server sprawl.
6. Significant Maintenance Overheads. You need to pay large hands-on admin time to our large physical server and hardware component fleets.
7. Poor Utilization Rates. For non-virtualized infrastructure, industry average server utilization rates are between 12-18%.

This totals out to an inflexible, slow-moving, and process-heavy architecture — which does not scale in today’s dynamic and fast-changing IT environments. These limitations are what virtualization is intended to help address.

The Basics of Virtualization

Virtualization inserts a software abstraction layer between computing hardware and the workloads running on it. This decouples operating systems and applications from the underlying physical infrastructure.

Workloads run in VMs, which behave like real servers with their own virtual CPU, RAM, storage, and network resources. The virtualization software or hypervisor allocates physical resources dynamically between VMs as needed.

This enables much higher efficiency and flexibility. Admins can run multiple VMs isolated from each other on a single server. VMs can move easily between servers with no dependency issues. IT can operate a fluid pool of consolidated compute resources that scale out with low friction.

In practice, key virtualization capabilities include:

1. Server Consolidation and Containers. Rather than siloed 1:1 application-to-server ratios, virtualization allows high densities of workloads to be consolidated into a common shared infrastructure.
2. Isolation and Workload Mobility. VMs operate independently with adjustable resources. Live migration moves running VMs between hosts without disruption.
3. Automation and Self-Service. Physical components are transformed into infrastructure that can be programmed with code open to automation rather than just a physical element.
4. High Availability and Rapid Failover. Continuous VM operation and fast failover in case of outages are possible with clustered hosts with shared storage.
5. Backups, Snapshots and Rollbacks. Snapshotting to Virginia machine state can roll back in seconds or minutes versus restoring any full server over hours or days.

There are many virtualization platforms, but VMware became the leader in mission-critical applications because it was the first to provide enterprise-class features.

VMware vSphere: Enterprise Virtualization Platform

VMware vSphere serves as the foundation for VMware’s industry-leading virtualized infrastructure solutions. Like any hypervisor, vSphere abstracts compute hardware and enables VMs. However, it brings a rich enterprise feature set and ecosystem of add-ons and management tools that led it to dominate business IT environments.

Key capabilities include:

1. Hypervisor. VMware ESXi installs directly onto bare metal servers to efficiently share resources among guest VMs.
2. Compute Virtualization. ESXi hosts run many VMs isolated from each other, dynamically allocating CPU and RAM as needed.
3. Network Virtualization. Software-defined virtual switches and distributed routing handle VM networking and traffic between hosts.
4. Storage Virtualization. Shared storage pools leverage high-performance technologies like flash, parallel access, erasure coding and compression.
5. Live Migration. Seamlessly move running VMs across hosts with VMware vMotion without disruption to users or loss of service.
6. High Availability. If any single host fails, VMs automatically restart on other available hosts in the cluster.
7. Distributed Resource Scheduler. Balances and allocates VMs across infrastructure to optimize performance, prevent overloads, and enforce policies.
8. Automation. VMware infrastructure integrates readily with popular automation and configuration tools to enable infrastructure-as-code approaches.
9. Security. VMware provides an efficient security model based on policy-driven firewalls and micro-segmentation to isolate threats.

Even these capabilities alone already provide much better results than the nonvirtual options. However, vSphere’s programmable infrastructure also provides a massive ecosystem of technology partners and integrated solutions for VMware to take advantage of.

Why VMware Virtualization Wins Over Traditional IT Infrastructure

The majority of companies tend to benefit by switching from old, redundant single server architecture with legacy software running on older versions of OS, running siloed applications for their needs, to the present day, virtualized architecture powered up with VMware.

The many advantages of virtualization include:

1. Cuts Hardware Costs via Consolidation Efficiencies

VMware enables far higher utilization of computing hardware than traditional architectures. By eliminating the binding constraints between servers, OS, and applications, virtualization makes supporting resources fluid pools rather than fragmented silos.

Conservative server consolidation ratios often fall between 8:1 and 12:1 when migrating physical workloads to virtualized infrastructure. However, densities of 25:1 or higher occur when organizations are fully transforming operations under software-defined approaches.

The bottom line is that more workloads run on less hardware, lowering capital expenditures on excess servers and data center space. Ongoing support and maintenance costs are similarly reduced in a smaller hardware footprint.

2. Streamlines IT Operations and Staff Overhead

Virtualization automates and simplifies management operations through software that would otherwise require extensive manual intervention across large fleets of servers. Server builds happen in software minutes, not hardware days. Inconsistent change controls convert to routine processes like patching and configuration updates.

VM automation and orchestration eliminate vast amounts of mundane maintenance. At the same time, infrastructure-as-code principles promote consistency, efficiency and flexibility. Staff gain time to focus on more innovative efforts rather than perpetual firefighting.

Additionally, the fundamental flexibility of fluid resource pools requires far less overhead planning and coordinating future capital projects for capacity expansions. Virtualized capacity scales smoothly on demand.

3. Enables Business Agility and Responsiveness

The agility of software-defined infrastructure accelerates how IT can enable the business. Provisioning new workloads happens in minutes versus weeks, waiting on procurement cycles for new servers. Capacity scales up almost instantly. Resources shift dynamically to business priorities.

This gives organizations the ability to take advantage of new opportunities in competitive environments. New apps and services deploy faster without dependency bottlenecks. Changing business needs see commensurate IT resources flow to the most important areas.

4. Minimizes Downtime and Disaster Impact

Physical servers with long restoration times in days after any failures are used for legacy infrastructure. Live migration, high availability, fast failover and instant boot make virtualization one of the techniques that reduce downtime to a minimum.

VMware High Availability, for example, is built-in redundancy mechanisms that automatically restart VMs on alternate hosts when a single server fails. Clustered shared storage allows non-disruptive VM mobility between hosts during maintenance.

Rapid snapshots, clones, and restores dramatically accelerate recovery times. The entire VM states rollback via logs in seconds or minutes instead of multi-hour bare metal restores. Backup windows shrink significantly.

Together, this greatly reduces the impact of both localized failures and larger outages. Applications stay online despite underlying hardware issues. Simple workload portability also helps migration off legacy platforms.

5. Global Team Collaboration Improves

The ability to encapsulate entire application stacks - OS, middleware, tools, configuration etc - as a single portable VM package streamlines collaboration. Developers build and test environments locally with production mimics. QA verifies updates easily. Ops stand up new instances rapidly.

All while avoiding traditional configuration drift challenges across environments. Everything related bundles together in a dynamic software-based unit. This consistency and control support improved feature velocity and quality.

6. Optimizes Resource Usage and Reclaims Stranded Capacity

The hypervisor allocates whatever computing, memory, storage and networking capacity a VM needs independent of physical limitations. Servers operate closer to maximum potential, with resources shifting dynamically to active workloads rather than sitting idle.

Virtual infrastructure also eliminates stranded capacity locked within individual servers. Shared resource pools aggregate all free resources for use versus fragmented silos in traditional architectures. VM mobility similarly grants access to excess capacity across locations.

7. Enhances Business Continuity Preparedness

Physical servers with long restoration times in days after any failures are used in legacy infrastructure. With live migration, virtualization can minimize downtime, provide high availability, and provide quick failover and instant boot.

VMware High Availability automatically restarts the VMs on alternate hosts if any server in the cluster is down. Clustered shared storage provides non-disruptive VM mobility between hosts during maintenance.

Rapid snapshots, clones, and restores dramatically accelerate recovery times. The entire VM states rollback via logs in seconds or minutes instead of multi-hour bare metal restores. Backup windows shrink significantly.

Together, this greatly reduces the impact of both localized failures and larger outages. Applications stay online despite underlying hardware issues. Simple workload portability also helps migration off legacy platforms.

8. Supports Innovation and Modernization

Many organizations struggle to implement new technologies on aging infrastructure locked into older platforms and architectures. Virtualizing workloads breaks these bonds.

Legacy apps migrate from outdated operating systems into portable VMs that are better positioned for transformation. Testing and deploying new technologies also becomes low risk and low friction in isolated environments.

This makes it far easier for IT to explore, trial and implement transformative technologies - whether containers, cloud-native apps, AI/ML platforms, or SaaS solutions. Virtualization serves as an on-ramp to tech modernization.

9. Integrates and Automates Operational Processes

VMware pioneered approaches to making infrastructure programmable code open to automation and orchestration. Server builds, configuration management, and infrastructure-as-a-service self-provisioning integrate readily with popular automation frameworks.

With this, the team is able to define components under source control and shift repetitive manual tasks to automated tooling. More reliable and efficient operations mean IT has more staff available for higher-value efforts.

Furthermore, forward-looking organizations embed the requests for infrastructure in the application lifecycle and developer pipeline automation via API-based automation.

10. Improves Security and Compliance Stance

Traditional IT architecture broadly links servers, apps, services, and data together across flat network segments. This grants attackers extensive reach if compromised. Siloed security tools also have huge gaps in visibility, leading to excessive breach impacts.

In contrast, VMware software-defined architecture institutes a least privilege security model enforced within the hypervisor. Granular policies wrap individual workloads with restricted lateral movement between VMs and micro-segmentation.

VM introspection allows tapping VM state to feed advanced threat detection solutions, too. So malicious activities hide nowhere within the fluid infrastructure. Meanwhile, VM mobility also enables the smooth migration of workloads off compromised hosts instantly.

Together, these facilities limit blast radius, stopping threats from spreading. VMware infrastructure readily secures compliance certifications, as well, given its underlying stability and security controls.

Conclusion

For most enterprises, it provides plenty of benefits: moving away from legacy static physical servers with old operating systems and further coupled siloed applications moving to modern virtualized infrastructure based around VMware technology.

The workloads are liberated from underlying hardware constraints through the use of the software abstraction layer. This allows for much greater flexibility, efficiency, automation and innovation on top of consolidated resource pools that are fluid via software controls rather than rigid physical constraints.

The many resultant advantages encompass much lower costs, greater business agility, streamlined operations, enhanced resilience, easy future innovation, and improved security.

VMware provides the industry’s most mature, proven, and reliable virtualization platform that is purpose-built to support enterprise workloads. The extensive feature set and massive ecosystem of integrated solutions give organizations a smooth on-ramp to fully software-defined, cloud-like infrastructure operations.

In competitive business environments demanding more dynamism, innovation, and cost efficiency from IT while securing critical information assets, VMware virtualization delivers where traditional infrastructure falls short. The software definition of resources is the future - and VMware sits at the forefront, leading the way.