GOING VIRTUAL
Popular Trend or Real Prospect for Enterprise Information Systems
Mariana Carroll, Paula Kotzé and Alta van der Merwe
Meraka Institute of the CSIR, PO Box 395, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa
School of Computing, University of South Africa, South Africa
Keywords: Virtualization, IT Challenges.
Abstract: Organisations are faced with a number of challenges and issues in decentralised, multiple-server, physical,
non-virtualized IT environments. Virtualization in recent years has had a significant impact on computing
environments and has introduced benefits, including server consolidation, server and hardware utilization
and reduced costs. Virtualization’s popularity has led to its growth in many IT environments. This paper
provides an overview of the IT challenges in non-virtualized environments and addresses the question of
whether virtualization provides the solution to these IT challenges.
1 INTRODUCTION
Virtualization technology is not entirely new. The
concept of virtualization dates back to the early
1950s when the first prototype of virtual memory
was introduced. However, with the introduction of
low-cost minicomputers and personal computers in
the 1980s and 1990s, the use of virtualization
declined. These low-cost minicomputers and
personal computers led to an explosion in the
number of physical servers. Due to security concerns
and resource limitations, organisations relied on
low-cost distributed systems. Some of the problems
experienced in distributed, multi-server computing
environments include underutilized servers;
deployment, update and support challenges; security
issues; increased physical infrastructure; human
resource costs; and challenges around disaster
recovery. These problems led to questions being
asked about the viability of servers being
consolidated and to the revival and growth of the
concept of virtualization in many IT environments
across all organisations.
In order for organisations to decide on
virtualization as a strategy, it is important that the
organisation understands the IT challenges within a
non-virtualized environment and the potential
benefits of virtualization as solution to these
challenges. The focus of this paper is to provide an
overview of the challenges in non-virtualized IT
environments and the potential of virtualization
addressing these challenges.
Section 2 of the paper provides some
background to the concept of non-virtualized
environments and virtualization. Section 3 describes
the research process followed. The IT challenges in
non-virtualized environments are discussed in
section 4, while the potential of virtualization to
solve these IT challenges is detailed in section 5.
Section 6 concludes the paper.
2 BACKGROUND
Virtualization enables multiple operating systems
and applications to run concurrently and in isolation
on a single physical host machine. It furthermore
enables multiple virtual machines to share in the
resources of the physical host machine, which in
turn ensures better utilization, optimization and
resource efficiency (Microsoft Corporation, 2009,
VMware Inc., 2009, Perri, 2008, Killalea, 2008,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Singh, 2004).
A typical virtual environment is depicted in
Figure 1 illustrating the concepts of multiple virtual
machines running on and utilizing a single host
operating system and the physical computer
hardware. The virtualization layer- / hypervisor runs
on the physical hardware and is responsible for the
hosting and managing of the virtual machines.
214
Carroll M., Kotzé P. and van der Merwe A. (2010).
GOING VIRTUAL - Popular Trend or Real Prospect for Enterprise Information Systems.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Databases and Information Systems Integration, pages
214-222
DOI: 10.5220/0002899202140222
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

Different applications and operating system versions
can therefore run simultaneously on the one physical
host machine.
Figure 1: Virtual environment.
Virtualization was introduced as early as the
1950s through initiation of automatic page
replacement and was the first working prototype of
virtual memory (Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006,
Singh, 2004). The first virtual machines (VMs)
introduced in the early 1960s were based on the
concept of self-virtualizing processor instructions.
The virtual machine allowed users to run multiple
operating systems on a single processor machine.
This concept was enhanced during the mid-1960s
with the emergence of time sharing. Hardware
virtualization was introduced next.
By the mid-1970s virtualization was well
established and organisations enjoyed benefits such
as increased storage (memory) capability, expanded
system capacity, less complex programming,
increased production and cost effectiveness.
Virtualization usage declined with the
introduction of low-cost minicomputers and personal
computers in the 1980s and 1990s. Placing more
than one application on a server was not a viable
option, and rather than sharing resources centrally,
organisations relied on low-cost distributed systems.
This resulted in underutilized servers, change
management challenges, security issues, increased
costs, and disaster recovery challenges (Campbell
and Jeronimo, 2006, Singh, 2004, Killalea, 2008).
Options such as consolidation, better resource
utilization and security controls were investigated
and virtualization was reintroduced during 1997
when Mendel Rosenblum (Stanford University) used
virtual machines to run multiple commodity
operating systems on a single scalable commodity
PC (Killalea, 2008). Through utilization of VMware
during 1998, they further enhanced virtual machine
capability by running multiple instances of x86-
compatible operating systems on a single
commodity PC. Xen, an open source VMM (virtual
machine monitor), was released during 2003,
allowing multiple commodity operating systems to
share conventional hardware effectively. During
2007 the major operating system vendors
(Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and Sun) announced
significant virtualization capabilities (Campbell and
Jeronimo, 2006, Singh, 2004, Killalea, 2008).
EMA (2008) estimates in their research report
that the virtualization market will grow by 20
percent on average for all virtualization technologies
during 2009 and 2010. In a report published by
Catbird Networks (2008) it is stated that
virtualization is expanding into mission critical and
core processing functions. Currently there are claims
that virtualization is being widely adopted (NetIQ
Corporation, 2009), is becoming the standard
infrastructure for data centres (Killalea, 2008) and
that its popularity is due to the promise of quick
deployment and cost savings (Perri, 2008, Singh,
2004).
The history and development of virtualization is
graphically depicted in Figure 2, from the IBM
Virtual Machine in the 1960s, up until recently in
2007 and beyond.
3 RESEARCH FOCUS AND
METHOD
With the emergence of low-cost minicomputers and
personal computers, management no longer needed
to incur the cost of expensive mainframe systems.
This led to an explosion in server numbers, as
placing more than one application on a server
creates security, management and compliance
concerns. Non-virtualized environments are
therefore characterized by multiple servers (i.e. a
server for each application, different servers for
different operating systems, web-, database-,
development-, testing- and back-up or replication-
servers) as shown in Figure 3. As a result IT
resources, server, maintenance, physical
environmental and management costs are becoming
a predicament in these non-virtualized IT
environments.
In order to appreciate the host of benefits
introduced through virtualization, it is imperative to
understand the challenges experienced in non-
virtualized environments. The benefits derived from
virtualization are a direct result of these IT
challenges, as described in the latter part of this
paper.
Application ApplicationApplication
Guest Operating
System
Guest Operating
System
Guest Operating
System
Virtualiza-tion
Definition
Virtualiza-tion
Defini tion
Virtualiza-tion
Definition
Virtual Machine 1 Virtual Machine 2 Virtual Machine 2
Virtualization Layer (VMM / Hypervisor)
Host Operating System
Physical Hardware
Hypervisor
Host Machine
Network
Netwo rk
Switch
GOING VIRTUAL - Popular Trend or Real Prospect for Enterprise Information Systems
215

Figure 2: History and development of virtualization (Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Singh, 2004, Killalea, 2008).
Figure 3: Non-virtualized environment.
This article reviews the challenges in non-
virtualized IT environments and discusses the
prospect of virtualization as a solution to these
challenges within the context of enterprise-wide
information systems.
The review was mainly based on a literature
study, conducting a contextual analysis to identify
the challenges and the proposed solutions provided
through virtualization. The literature study followed
an inductive reasoning approach, using
representative secondary resources (selecting a
sample of work or texts in order to understand and
conceptualise the necessary information). These
resources included available databases online library
catalogues, published articles, relevant textbooks,
industry specific information and trusted resources
from the internet. The construction research method
was followed to derive, analyse and present a
summary from the literature survey through
interpretive research.
Section 4 presents the challenges identified,
whilst section 5 discusses how virtualization may
provide a solution to these challenges.
4 IT CHALLENGES IN
NON-VIRTUALIZED
ENVIRONMENTS
During the review and analysis of the literature,
server proliferation was found to be the most
common challenge in non-virtualized environments
(Figure 4). Other concerns include high costs, being
unable to run more than one operating system on a
machine, and change management. Centralization
was the concern mentioned the least in the literature.
Each of these challenges is briefly discussed below.
Early 1960's:
IBM Virtual Machine -
System /360 model 67
Mid 1960's:
IBM Time sha ring
-IBM 7044 (44X)
Led to widely used
VM/timesha ring systems
- IBM VM/370
Introduce concept of
hardware virtualization
Mid 1970's:
Virtualization well accepted by
users of various operating
systems
1980 & 1990's:
Declined when low-cost
minicomputers and personal
PC's were introduced
1990's:
Explosion in number of
servers per enterprise
Late 1990's:
Underutilised servers;
Deployment, update and
support challenges; Security
and Disaster recover issues.
1997 & 1998:
Disco project - Multiple O/S
on single multiprocessor, led to
development of VMware
2003:
Development Xen (open
source VMM)
2007:
Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat &
Sun introduce new
virtualization capabilities
2007 & beyond:
Continious growth and
increased popularity
INTER-
NET
Global
Network
VPN
Web
Network
Switch
Network
Switch
Network
Switch
Web
Servers
Mail
Server
WINDOWS
application
servers
UNIX
application
servers
Development /
Testing
servers
Database
servers
Network
Bridge
Database
Replicate
Network
Bridge
Remote Disaster Recovery Site
Leas
ed
Lines
Leas
ed
Lines
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Figure 4: IT challenges in non-virtualized environments.
 Server proliferation: Vulnerability to software
faults, security threats, the inability of applications
to co-exist on a single server, scalability
considerations and avoiding a single point of failure
have led to the implementation of multiple servers or
server silos. This, in turn, introduced a host of
problems such as: underutilization of resources;
deployment, update and support challenges;
management and administration issues and costs;
additional data centre costs; and operational
complexities (Sgallari, 2009, Hewlett Packard
Development Company, 2009, Qureshi, 2007,
VMware Inc., 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006, Humphreys
and Grieser, 2006, Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006,
Singh, 2004).
 Costs: The proliferation of servers and
decentralised nature of non-virtualized IT
environments led to increased environmental,
management and administration costs. These costs
include: power and cooling; floor space; physical
hardware; software licences; application support;
deployments and updates; labour; resource
requirements; and redundancy. Such costs are
leading to increased total cost of ownership (TCO)
and a reduced return on investment (ROI) (Sgallari,
2009, Hewlett Packard Development Company,
2009, Qureshi, 2007, VMware Inc., 2006,
Nellitheertha, 2006, Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006,
Singh, 2004).
 Multiple operating systems: Non-virtualized
environments are characterised by the inability to
run multiple operating systems, different versions or
even entirely different systems simultaneously,
because the operating systems are bound to the
underlying physical hardware. Some of these
systems may also be difficult or impossible to run on
newer hardware. This impedes the ability to freely
load-balance resources and to ensure resource
utilization (Sgallari, 2009, Hewlett Packard
Development Company, 2009, Qureshi, 2007,
VMware Inc., 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006, Campbell
and Jeronimo, 2006, Singh, 2004).
 Change management: Server proliferation
further complicates the ability to adapt smoothly to
changes in demand for services and it also
complicates the process of patching, upgrading,
troubleshooting and maintaining operating system
and application software. Another challenge is
machine unavailability while performing
maintenance. Furthermore, debugging and
performance monitoring lead to loss in productivity.
High costs are also associated with the setup of
separate test and development environments to
ensure that changes are subjected to proper change
Centralization
RegulatoryRequir ements
Migration
Legacysystems
Availability
Security
DisasterRecovery
Scalability
Managementandadministration
Applicationco‐existence
ChangeManage ment
Multipleoperatingsystems
Costs
ServerProliferation
IT Challenges in non-virtualized computing environments
LowestOccurrence
HighestOccurrence
GOING VIRTUAL - Popular Trend or Real Prospect for Enterprise Information Systems
217

and test management (Sgallari, 2009, Hewlett
Packard Development Company, 2009, Qureshi,
2007, VMware Inc., 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Singh, 2004).
 Application co-existence: Many applications are
not written to co-exist within a single execution
environment and often create conflict. Single
application workloads also do not scale well as
demand increases. The cost due to underutilization
and management complexity increases (Singh, 2004,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Humphreys and
Grieser, 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006, VMware Inc.,
2006, Qureshi, 2007).
 Management and administration: Multi-server,
decentralised environments lead to complex and
difficult management and administration of the
server, data centre and desktop infrastructures. More
servers require more administration. Complexities in
infrastructure management further lead to a decrease
in productivity and efficiency (Singh, 2004,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006,
Qureshi, 2007, Hewlett Packard Development
Company, 2009).
 Scalability: The ability to deploy new services
and responsiveness in supporting new business
initiatives or organisational changes is critical to
remain competitive. As the organisation grows – and
the number of users who could encounter installation
and upgrade problems increases –the support burden
for the roll-out of IT-approved and tested systems
and application software increases. As the number of
machines increases, manual patching, upgrading and
maintaining operating system and application
software simply does not scale well. In data centres
scalability is often achieved by deploying more
physical hardware to meet demand. This entails
acquiring new machines or additional resources,
which can be expensive to maintain (Campbell and
Jeronimo, 2006, VMware Inc., 2006, Qureshi, 2007,
Sgallari, 2009).
 Disaster recovery: With disaster recovery in
non-virtualized environments, users typically
experience a delay as administrators prepare a new
server and recover the data if a failure occurs. Back-
up and restores also impact availability of systems.
Maintaining mirrored or replicated servers for back-
up and recovery purposes is expensive (Singh, 2004,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Hewlett Packard
Development Company, 2009, Sgallari, 2009).
 Security: Security threats include system
breaches and data theft. Having to patch or upgrade
a critical server can also result in unacceptable
system downtime. As a result, it is not unusual for
servers to continue to run unpatched software long
after a security exploit has been discovered and a
software vendor has released a patch for it, which
also means non-compliance with change
management policies (Singh, 2004, Campbell and
Jeronimo, 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006, Qureshi, 2007).
 Availability: Enterprises provide for excess
capacity in terms of resources, computing power,
storage and bandwidth to ensure availability.
Preparing separate machines for software updates
for back-up and restore purposes of prior versions,
requires additional hardware, or taking down the
currently running servers to update them, which
impacts availability. Physical hardware failures
further augment unavailability of systems. To
prevent this, redundancy is built into the IT
infrastructure, but at an exponential cost (Campbell
and Jeronimo, 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006, Hewlett
Packard Development Company, 2009, Sgallari,
2009).
 Legacy systems: To maintain the continuity of
the business, the IT department must keep
potentially unsupported and obsolete operating
systems and applications for legacy or in-house
developed systems up and running. Porting the older
programs to the new operating systems is a potential
solution, but is usually not an option because of the
costs associated with software development. Co-
existence with other applications on the same server
is not a viable option because of security,
compatibility, or data integrity issues (Singh, 2004,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006).

Migration: Application migration provides
difficulties such as 1) balancing downtime; 2)
optimal total migration time; 3) dependence on
operating system resources such as file descriptors,
network connections and shared memory segments;
and 4) the requirement that the original machine
remain available in some instances, thereby
preventing administrators from taking down the
original machine for servicing. Difficulty is also
experienced in terms of the complexity of hardware
upgrade cycles for notebook computers, requiring
the users to migrate their customized environments
and data to the new machines (Singh, 2004,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006,
Qureshi, 2007).
 Regulatory requirements: There is a climate of
increasingly stringent regulatory requirements that
IT management and teams must adhere to (VMware
Inc., 2006, Qureshi, 2007).
 Centralization: Server proliferation and the
management of cost versus security threats have led
to the decentralization of data centres and servers,
communication and desktops. Decentralized
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environments require specialists in different
platforms on each site, as well as a database
administrator and infrastructure administrator
(Sgallari, 2009).
5 VIRTUALIZATION AS
SOLUTION TO CHALLENGES
IDENTIFIED
Virtualization introduces many benefits, hence the
rapid growth of the technology and adaption of
virtualization by the majority of organisations. The
actuality of virtualization providing a solution to IT
challenges in non-virtualized environments is widely
acknowledged. For example, Qureshi (2007:1) states
that “ ... there are bright spots on the horizon –
technological innovations that promise to help IT
departments cope with these challenges. Among
these, virtualization technology is a top contender
for providing relief”. Nellitheertha (2006:2) also
indicates that “virtualization is an efficient means of
addressing these problems”. EMA (2008:11) states
that “there is little doubt that virtualization is
delivering significant value – both measurable and
intangible – to the majority of enterprises that are
deploying it”. Humphreys and Grieser (2006:1)
concur with these statements when indicating that
over the past years virtualization was made an
important solution for scaled-out hardware resource
sharing. Hewlett Packard Development Company
(2009) states that “...the technology is established as
a proven solution for increasing server hardware
utilizations, consolidating existing servers,
controlling physical server sprawl while making it
faster and easier to deploy new servers all while
reducing costs”.
Virtualization’s potential to solve the IT
challenges, identified in section 4 are as follows:
 Server proliferation: A widely acknowledged
primary benefit of virtualization is the ability of this
technology to consolidate servers, thereby increasing
utilization and reducing costs (Bass, 2009, Berman,
2009, Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Check Point
Software Technologies Ltd., 2009, Enterprise
Management Associates, 2008, Gardner, 2009,
Hewlett Packard Development Company, 2009,
Hoesing, 2006, Humphreys and Grieser, 2006,
Killalea, 2008, Nellitheertha, 2006, Qureshi, 2007,
Robb, 2008, Sgallari, 2009, Singh, 2004, Sun
Microsystems Inc., 2009, VMware Inc., 2006).
 Costs: Mentioned by more than half of the
sources considered and widely regarded as one of
the main advantages of virtualization is the reduction
in costs. These include hardware, administration and
management, energy efficiency (i.e. power and
cooling), and software costs (Berman, 2009,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Enterprise
Management Associates, 2008, Gardner, 2009,
Hewlett Packard Development Company, 2009,
Hoesing, 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006, Newman, 2009,
Novell Inc., 2008, Perri, 2008, Qureshi, 2007, Robb,
2008, Senft and Gallegos, 2009, Sgallari, 2009,
Singh, 2004, Strom, 2008, Sun Microsystems Inc.,
2009, VMware Inc., 2006).
 Multiple operating systems: Virtualization
technology has the ability to host multiple operating
systems of different platforms (i.e. Windows and
UNIX) on a single server. This consolidation of
servers also increases resource sharing and therefore
leads to better utilization of hardware and servers
(Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Hewlett Packard
Development Company, 2009, Humphreys and
Grieser, 2006, Killalea, 2008, Nellitheertha, 2006,
Singh, 2004, VMware Inc., 2006).
 Change management: IT’s ability to deploy
changes quickly and efficiently is greatly enhanced,
given the ability of VMs to be suspended, resumed
and migrated across physical platforms without
interrupting service availability. Other advantages
include 1) enforcement of company policy through
pre-configured VM images and 2) easy distribution
of changes (Bass, 2009, Campbell and Jeronimo,
2006, Enterprise Management Associates, 2008,
Gardner, 2009, Haber, 2009, Hewlett Packard
Development Company, 2009, Hoesing, 2006,
Humphreys and Grieser, 2006, Killalea, 2008,
Nellitheertha, 2006, Newman, 2009, Novell Inc.,
2008, Perri, 2008, Qureshi, 2007, Robb, 2008, Senft
and Gallegos, 2009, Sgallari, 2009, Singh, 2004,
Strom, 2008, VMware Inc., 2006).
 Application co-existence: “Virtualization lets
you run multiple virtual machines on a single
physical machine, sharing the resources of that
single computer across multiple environments.
Different virtual machines can run different
operating systems and multiple applications on the
same physical computer” (VMware Inc., 2009).
 Management and administration: Ease of
administration and management include 1)
simplifying server management and maintenance by
reducing the number of servers (consolidation); 2)
higher availability due to easy deployment of VM
images, making backup and recovery easier and
more manageable; 3) easier and quicker deployment
options; 4) flexibility to be responsive and adaptable
to changing needs with speed and agility; 5) quick
GOING VIRTUAL - Popular Trend or Real Prospect for Enterprise Information Systems
219

live migrations; 6) reduced downtime; 7) adequate,
effective and feasible development and testing
environments; and 8) powerful debugging and
performance monitoring capabilities (Campbell and
Jeronimo, 2006, Gardner, 2009, Hiner, 2009,
Humphreys and Grieser, 2006, Nellitheertha, 2006,
Novell Inc., 2008, Strom, 2008, VMware Inc.,
2006).
 Scalability: The following contribute to the
ability of an IT department to respond quickly to
organisational changes: 1) running different
operating systems simultaneously on a single
platform; 2) duplicating and moving VMs
seamlessly between different hosts; and 3) the ease
and efficiency of deploying changes (Berman, 2009,
Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Hernandez, 2009,
Humphreys and Grieser, 2006, Killalea, 2008,
Nellitheertha, 2006).
 Disaster recovery: Virtualization provides a
more cost-effective and less complex solution to
replication and redundancy strategies. Data backup
capabilities are enhanced through virtualization’s
snapshot (portable file) feature. Other benefits
include: 1) saving on hardware costs for disaster
recovery; 2) reducing time to restore services; and 3)
cost savings by migrating VMs between sites (Bass,
2009, Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Enterprise
Management Associates, 2008, Gardner, 2009,
Hewlett Packard Development Company, 2009,
Hoesing, 2006, Humphreys and Grieser, 2006,
Killalea, 2008, Nellitheertha, 2006, Newman, 2009,
Perri, 2008, Robb, 2008, Sgallari, 2009, Singh,
2004, Sun Microsystems Inc., 2009).
 Security: It is possible to create separate
isolated VMs and thereby reduce potential security
risks. IT security policy enforcement is less complex
when applied per VM and it also enhances
administrative control of resources (Campbell and
Jeronimo, 2006, Check Point Software Technologies
Ltd., 2009, Enterprise Management Associates,
2008, Killalea, 2008, Nellitheertha, 2006, Novell
Inc., 2008, Qureshi, 2007, Senft and Gallegos,
2009).
 Availability: Virtualization technology enables
a VM to be moved dynamically, “on the fly”, to
other hardware platforms with little or no effect on
the user. This means that VMs can be migrated
while the applications continue to run. System
downtime is therefore eliminated or reduced (Bass,
2009, Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Enterprise
Management Associates, 2008, Gardner, 2009,
Hewlett Packard Development Company, 2009,
Hoesing, 2006, Humphreys and Grieser, 2006,
Killalea, 2008, Nellitheertha, 2006, Newman, 2009,
Perri, 2008, Robb, 2008, Sgallari, 2009, Singh,
2004, Sun Microsystems Inc., 2009).
 Legacy systems: Virtualization’s ability to run
multiple operating systems within one physical
environment enables IT scenarios where legacy
operating systems need to run side by side with
modern systems (Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006,
Humphreys and Grieser, 2006, Killalea, 2008,
Nellitheertha, 2006, Newman, 2009, Singh, 2004,
VMware Inc., 2006).
 Migration: VMs (operating systems or
applications) can be moved automatically or
manually between platforms with little effort. The
migration is validated in virtual partitions and
therefore lessens the possibilities of service
disruptions (Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006,
Humphreys and Grieser, 2006, Killalea, 2008,
Nellitheertha, 2006, Novell Inc., 2008, Perri, 2008,
Qureshi, 2007, Singh, 2004, VMware Inc., 2006).
 Regulatory requirement s: There is no reason
why a virtualized environment should not conform
to regulatory requirements. Virtualization however
lessens the management and administration burden
and therefore makes the implementation and
management of regulatory requirements easier.
 Centralization: Consolidation and better
utilization of resources have led to the reduction in
system administration cost, responsibility and
increased productivity, as well as to the
centralization of systems (Bass, 2009, Berman,
2009, Campbell and Jeronimo, 2006, Check Point
Software Technologies Ltd., 2009, Enterprise
Management Associates, 2008, Gardner, 2009,
Hewlett Packard Development Company, 2009,
Hoesing, 2006, Humphreys and Grieser, 2006,
Killalea, 2008, Nellitheertha, 2006, Qureshi, 2007,
Robb, 2008, Sgallari, 2009, Singh, 2004, Sun
Microsystems Inc., 2009, VMware Inc., 2006).
It can therefore be concluded that the benefits of
virtualization are a direct result of having to deal
with the IT challenges in non-virtualized
environments. Virtualization has been presented as
the solution to these challenges, hence the popularity
of this technology.
6 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper the focus was on providing an overview
of the challenges experienced in non-virtualized IT
environments and to discuss virtualization as a
solution to these challenges. The main challenge in
non-virtualized environments was identified to be
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220

server proliferation, which led to underutilization of
resources, change management challenges,
management and administration issues and costs,
additional data centre and other hardware and
software costs, and operational complexities. A
number of these challenges in the non-virtualized
environment have the potential to be addressed
through virtualization. In this paper an overview
were given of the different solutions suggested in
literature, including the consolidation of multiple
operating systems and applications to co-exist on a
single platform, reduction in costs, better resource
utilization, quick and efficient change management,
ease of administration and management, scalability,
cost-effective and less complex disaster recovery
solutions, increased security and reduced system
downtime.
Virtualization has shown tremendous growth and
increasing popularity in recent years. The major
benefits of implementing virtualization are based on
IT challenges experienced in non-virtualized
environments. It is also highlighted in the literature
that virtualization will continue to grow in the years
to come - especially given that cloud computing uses
virtualization as a technology for enablement. In
future research it is necessary to address the
importance of virtualization in a cloud environment
and also to investigate the benefits and risks
introduced by virtualization. Virtualization is
therefore not just another popular trend: it is
providing a solution to IT challenges experienced in
non-virtualized environments.
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