--- title: What is virtual infrastructure? url: https://www.vmware.com/topics/virtual-infrastructure description: Learn about virtual infrastructure, which is a collection of software-defined components that form an enterprise IT environment. --- # What is virtual infrastructure? Virtual infrastructure, sometimes called software-defined infrastructure (SDI), is a collection of software-defined components that form an enterprise IT environment. Virtual infrastructure delivers the primary capabilities of physical infrastructure, but since it is software-defined, it provides more flexibility and agility, allowing IT teams to rapidly allocate resources across multiple systems based on shifting business needs. By decoupling system capabilities from the physical hardware, virtual infrastructure enhances resource utilization, flexibility, and scalability while reducing costs. These benefits are valuable to organizations of all sizes, providing significant cost savings through optimized resource utilization and the scalability to start small and grow as the business demands dictate. ## Virtual infrastructure considerations From design to [disaster recovery](https://www.vmware.com/topics/disaster-recovery), there are certain virtual infrastructure requirements organizations must meet to reap long-term value from their investment. - **Plan ahead:** When designing a virtual infrastructure, IT teams should consider how business growth, market fluctuations, and advancements in technology might impact their hardware requirements and reliance on compute, networking, and storage resources. - **Look for ways to cut costs:** IT infrastructure costs can become unwieldy if IT teams don’t take the time to continuously examine a virtual infrastructure and its deliverables. Cost-cutting initiatives may range from replacing old servers and renegotiating vendor agreements to automating time-consuming server management tasks. - **Prepare for failure:** Despite its failover hardware and high availability, even the most resilient virtual infrastructure can experience downtime. IT teams should prepare for worst-case scenarios by taking advantage of monitoring tools, purchasing extra hardware, and relying on clusters to better manage host resources. ## Virtual infrastructure concepts By separating physical hardware from operating systems, virtualization can provision compute, memory, storage, and networking resources across multiple [virtual machines (VMs)](https://www.vmware.com/topics/virtual-machine) to improve application performance, reduce costs, and simplify management. Despite variances in design and functionality, a virtual infrastructure typically consists of these concepts: - **Virtualized compute:** Also known as software-defined compute, virtualized compute offers the same capabilities as physical servers but is more efficient, agile, and cost-effective. Through virtualization, many operating systems and applications can run on a single physical server, whereas in traditional infrastructure, servers were often underutilized. Virtual computing also makes modern technologies like [cloud computing](https://www.vmware.com/topics/cloud) and [containers](https://www.vmware.com/topics/containers) possible. - **Virtualized storage:** Also known as software-defined storage, virtualized storage frees organizations from the constraints and limitations of hardware by combining pools of physical storage capacity into a single, more manageable repository. By aggregating the local storage devices (hard drives, solid state storage) from multiple physical servers in a cluster to create a single, shared pool of capacity, the software allocates storage from the servers you already have and presents it to your virtual machines as a unified, high-performance data store. - **Software-defined networking and security:** Virtualized networking and security, also referred to as [software-defined networking (SDN)](https://www.vmware.com/topics/software-defined-networking) and software-defined security (SDS), separates networking services from the hardware they run on. This allows the entire network and security infrastructure to be managed completely through software. Virtual networking reproduces the entire network model, including switching, routing, security, firewalling, and intrusion detection in software, providing higher levels of cybersecurity, compliance, and governance. - **Software-defined management:** Managing virtual infrastructure provides a centralized manner for configuring, managing, and provisioning virtualized IT infrastructure, as well as automating processes. A management solution allows IT teams to migrate virtual machines from one physical server to another without delays or downtime while enabling high availability for applications running in virtual machines, disaster recovery, and backup administration. ## Virtual infrastructure architecture A virtual infrastructure architecture can help organizations transform and manage their IT system infrastructure through virtualization. But it requires the right building blocks to deliver results. These include: - **Host:** A virtualization layer that manages resources and other services for virtual machines. Virtual machines run on these individual hosts, which continuously perform monitoring and management activities in the background. Multiple hosts can be grouped to work on the same network and storage subsystems, culminating in combined computing and memory resources to form a cluster. Machines can be dynamically added or removed from a cluster. - [**Hypervisor**](https://www.vmware.com/topics/hypervisor): A software layer that enables one host computer to simultaneously support multiple virtual operating systems, also known as virtual machines. By sharing the same physical computing resources, such as memory, processing, and storage, the hypervisor stretches available resources and improves IT flexibility. - **Virtual machine:** These software-defined computers encompass operating systems, software programs, and documents. Managed by a virtual infrastructure, each virtual machine has its own operating system called a guest operating system. The key advantage of virtual machines is that IT teams can provision them faster and more easily than physical machines without the need for hardware procurement. Better yet, IT teams can easily deploy and suspend a virtual machine and control access privileges for greater security. These privileges are based on policies set by a system administrator. - **User interface:** This front-end element means administrators can view and manage virtual infrastructure components by connecting directly to the server host or through a browser-based interface. ## Benefits of virtual infrastructure The benefits of virtualization touch every aspect of an IT infrastructure, from storage and server systems to networking tools. Here are some key benefits of a virtual infrastructure: - **Cost savings:** By consolidating servers, virtualization reduces capital and operating costs associated with variables such as electrical power, physical security, hosting, and server development. - **Scalability:** A virtual infrastructure allows organizations to react quickly to changing customer demands and market trends by ramping up CPU utilization or scaling back accordingly. - **Increased productivity:** Faster provisioning of applications and resources allows IT teams to respond more quickly to employee demands for new tools and technologies. The result: increased productivity, efficiency, and agility for IT teams, and an enhanced employee experience and increased talent retention rates without hardware procurement delays. - **Simplified server management:** From seasonal spikes in consumer demand to unexpected economic downturns, organizations need to respond quickly. Simplified server management ensures IT teams can spin up or down virtual machines when required and re-provision resources based on real-time needs. Furthermore, many management consoles offer dashboards, automated alerts, and reports so that IT teams can respond immediately to server performance issues. ## How VMware products can help [VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vmware-cloud-foundation) delivers virtual infrastructure by providing an integrated, automated private cloud platform that combines virtualized compute ([vSphere](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere)), storage ([vSAN](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsan)), and networking ([NSX](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/nsx)) into a single, unified platform. VCF accelerates infrastructure delivery through [automation](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vcf-automation), consistent [operations](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vcf-operations) across on-prem, [edge](https://www.vmware.com/topics/edge-cloud), and [public cloud](https://www.vmware.com/topics/public-cloud) environments, providing support for traditional, AI, and [containerized](https://www.vmware.com/topics/containers) applications. ## Recommended for You - [Virtual Machines](https://www.vmware.com/topics/virtual-machine) - [Private Cloud](https://www.vmware.com/topics/private-cloud) - [Hypervisor](https://www.vmware.com/topics/hypervisor) - [Cloud Architecture](https://www.vmware.com/topics/cloud-architecture) ## Related Products and Solutions - [VMware vSphere](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere) - [VMware vSphere Foundation](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere-foundation) - [VMware Cloud Foundation](https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vmware-cloud-foundation) ## Also of Interest - [What is Platform Engineering?](https://www.vmware.com/topics/platform-engineering) - [What is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Security (VDI Security)?](https://www.vmware.com/topics/virtual-desktop-infrastructure-security) - [What is Server Virtualization?](https://www.vmware.com/topics/server-virtualization)