Virtualisation is a buzzword much abused in the media.  But what does it mean to you?  Very often organisations find that their servers are underutilised – leading to increased associated costs such as electrical power or air-conditioning considerations.  Consolidation means using your servers for more than one application such that your investment in IT infrastructure is maximised.

Virtualisation is one such mechanism to help consolidate different servers with different load patterns onto fewer servers than would otherwise be deployed.  Once a particular application is identified as needing more resources, then it can be easily moved to another more powerful server with minimal disruption to system operations.