Virtualization can be a major investment, but it provides some surprising benefits.

Shared redundancy -

If your virtualization servers are designed with redundancy in mind, all the virtual machines running will ‘inherit’ that redundancy including: identical hardware to run on if the original fails, faster and redundant network connections, and redundant storage.

Simplified ‘bare-metal backups’ -

“Bare-metal” backups are backups that include everything needed to restore a system to a blank drive - no need to reinstall windows and your applications. A traditional PC backup can include the files, but windows needs some files to be in specific sectors on the physical drive to start as well as the drive’s boot sector which doesn’t typically get backed up at all. Since virtual machine files include absolutely everything the system need to run, when you back up those files, you have everything.

Simplified hardware upgrades -

After 5 years or so, your computer hardware will no longer be supported by the manufacturer which means it’s time to replace it on your terms before it breaks down and you have a disaster at the worst possible moment. All your virtual machines can simply be restarted on your new hosting hardware without any changes.

Simplified migration to hosted or cloud -

If you want to migrate your systems to run at a remote hosting facility or in the cloud, being able to ship your entire server or set of servers to them on a USB drive to handle the conversion while you continue to run your business without interruption.

Shared, centralized resources -

Since your host server(s) keep all the files in a single location, you only have to backup one place which is simpler to maintain and monitor -- and often less expensive. You can efficiently protect your host server(s) with things like secondary network connections, battery backup power and redundant data storage.

Hypervisor overhead is minimal -

For a system that is dedicated to host virtual machines, the operating system that is installed to the bare hardware is called the ‘hypervisor’. Although it handles presenting virtual hardware for all the vm’s to run on top of and shares resources and all the other things that make virtualization possible, the hypervisor is very small, can be installed very quickly and uses very little cpu and memory itself. In most cases, benchmark tests of a vm and the same OS running on the same hardware give results within the testing margin of error.