Description:

This document describes the challenges that businesses face in maintaining IT solutions in light of continually changing system hardware and shows how using VMware virtual infrastructure can eliminate or reduce the impact of some of the factors involved. The primary audience for the document is system administrators and data center architects who need to design IT infrastructure that can run applications for many years without requiring changes. VMware vSphere virtual machines provide an abstraction called virtual hardware that isolates operating systems from changes in physical hardware. Running older applications and operating systems in virtual machines allows such applications to be used without changes for longer than they might be on physical hardware. Running applications in virtual machines also reduces the cost of retesting applications each time the physical hardware is changed.