The benefits of virtualization apply to the IT enterprise and industrial automation including:

• Application load-balancing.
• Decreased energy consumption and footprint.
• Extended lifecycles and more.
• Hardware consolidation.
• High availability.
• Improved uptime.
• Increased fault tolerance.
• Rapid disaster recovery.

A complete virtual solution consists of software and hardware components.

Typical virtualization architectures consist of physical components including servers (hosts), storage arrays, Ethernet networks, a management PC, and desktop clients.

Considerations for Designing a Solution