Virtualization Pros and Cons

Pros

• Affordable disaster recovery
• Data center footprint reduction (e.g., space, energy, cooling)
• Fast system provisioning (e.g., from months/weeks to days)
• Hardware lock-in escape
• High physical resource utilization (e.g., from 5-7% to 50-70%)
• Near-zero maintenance downtime (thanks to live migration technologies)
  • Transparent hardware replacement

Cons

• Investment in capacity management (for dynamic, large-scale virtual infrastructures only)
• ISVs limited support (e.g., Oracle)
• Partially market immaturity
• High price for software platforms (e.g., VMware) and hardware infrastructure (e.g., SAN)
• High risk of virtual machine sprawl