What is a Virtual Infrastructure?

In essence, a virtual infrastructure is a dynamic mapping of physical resources to business needs. While a virtual machine represents the physical resources of a single computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the physical resources of the entire IT environment, aggregating x86 computers and their attached network and storage into a unified pool of IT resources.

Structurally, a virtual infrastructure consists of the following components:

• Single-node hypervisors to enable full virtualization of each x86 computer.
  
  
• A set of virtualization-based distributed system infrastructure services such as resource management to optimize available resources among virtual machines.
  
  
• Automation solutions that provide special capabilities to optimize a particular IT process such as provisioning or disaster recovery.

Virtual Infrastructure Benefits

VMware has made it possible to fully realize the enormous benefits of virtualization in production-scale IT environments by building virtual infrastructure automation and management capabilities around a best-in-class hypervisor. In fact, 86% of VMware customers use virtualization in production and 43% deploy most new production applications in virtual machines.

VMware virtual infrastructure solutions are ideal for production environments in part because they run on industry-standard servers and desktops and support a wide range of operating system and application environments, as well as networking and storage infrastructure. We have designed our solutions to function independently of the hardware and operating system to provide customers with a broad platform choice. As a result, our solutions provide a key integration point for hardware and infrastructure management vendors to deliver differentiated value that can be applied uniformly across all application and operating system environments.

VMware customers who have adopted our virtual infrastructure solutions have reported dramatic results, including:

• 60-80% utilization rates for x86 servers (up from 5-15% in non-virtualized PCs)
• Cost savings of more than $3,000 annually for every workload virtualized
• Ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks
• 85% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime

Find out why VMware customers standardize on our virtual infrastructure solutions by reading about VMware Infrastructure 3 adoption trends.

Looking for VMware Infrastructure?

Learn more about VMware Infrastructure 3, the next generation of industry-leading infrastructure virtualization software that virtualizes servers, storage and networking, allowing multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources.