The virtual revolution is happening across the enterprise world. A single machine running multiple servers at the same time, hosting hundreds of virtual desktops at the same time, is replacing tens of machines that it used to take to do the same job. The ability for a number of different computers to be running simultaneously on fewer pieces of hardware has revolutionized the computer industry. Costs of technical infrastructure are plummeting, and the tools to manage them are increasingly easy and fast.
Virtual desktops spread this savings to the individual computers being utilized by the users. Since virtual desktops are processed by the server, saving only the image to be sent and processed by the computer, individual desktops do not need to be the power hungry hogs they once were. Gone are the days where the only discounts on computers were found by buying powerful computers in bulk only to have them underused by the email warrior workforce. Now, with a server allocating resources from a single machines, only those who need it get the more powerful resources, and cheaper computers can be used on each person’s desk.
The hypervisor on a virtualized server keeps an eye on the memory and storage space available to any program. It can also maintain a limit on users that log into particular accounts for certain applications so that licensing restrictions are not violated. The hypervisor communicates with the hardware, divides up the total resources amongst the server applications or those logged in, and passes along the information to the operating systems that are tricked into thinking that is all that is available. If you wanted to make some software downloads, for instance, the value the operating system gets for available storage space is the amount told to it by the hypervisor, not the actual amount on the server. This creates easily enforceable storage quotas, as the operating system will start giving warnings when its space is out and will refuse to write to disk if there is no space leftover.
When a company uses VMware backup solutions (or whichever application), it can easily backup each and every server running on the network along with any virtualized environments, including desktops, files, settings, and applications. Instead of having to go from computer to computer or organizing backups from hundreds of different endpoints, the backup solution can take everything on the interconnected solution and create a single compressed and deduplicated data backup.