Why does virtualization speed up server deployment?

In many cases, companies can greatly increase the speed of server deployment by utilizing virtualized systems.

One of the best ways to explain this is that virtualization removes the possibility of handling actual physical hardware components. In a virtualized system, companies make pools of CPU and memory into workable hardware components – they can create server functionality without going out and buying a server and putting it into rack space and configuring it, etc.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see how virtualization tends to make server deployment much easier and quicker. All of those physical steps of procuring and getting servers in place can be eliminated. There are also many protocols within a virtualization environment that help companies to respond to elastic demand and to scale quickly – and that includes server provisioning and server deployment. It wouldn’t be uncommon for a company that took a month or more to implement a new server in the pre-cloud and pre-virtualization age to be able to deploy a server within days after upgrading systems and taking advantage of the principle of virtualization.

With that said, it’s important to note that virtualization doesn’t currently speed up server deployment. Theoretically, if a company had a physical server on hand and was able to dedicate all available resources to putting it in place quickly, the whole thing could be done in a matter of days. By the same token, if the company had a less workable virtualization plan and needed to do a lot of handholding through the server setup process, deploying in a virtualized system could take quite a while. Some of the other factors in the speed of server deployment relate to how companies are able to support quick processes – what teams are on hand to work with and monitor server activity, and generally how the company has created a scalability plan for adding to its existing hardware architecture.

Of course, speeding up server deployment is not the only benefit of virtualization. Many of the biggest draws for the many companies adopting virtualization systems is the ability to provision services by creating virtual machines, instead of manually adding hardware. Evident benefits include easier changes to workload handling, more versatility in data in transit and data at rest, and in general, the efficiency of having digital partitioning instead of linking up physical hardware elements. In addition, companies can use new automation systems to drive automated changes in virtualization – for example, rather than needing to pore over logs and adjust performance resources manually, systems operators can simply program systems to adjust themselves. This version of “IT autopilot” frees up tremendous resources for a business – and that’s part of how virtualization is so much a part of the discussion around the IT industry today.