Microsoft Virtualization Delivers

Virtualization is much more than simply consolidating physical servers and cutting data center costs. At Microsoft, virtualization means helping IT departments maximize ROI and cost savings across the enterprise, and powerfully improving business continuity. That's why we created a portfolio of products that address all aspects of the physical and virtual infrastructure—servers, networks, applications, and desktops—across multiple hypervisors, and that can be easily managed through a centralized console.

A Full Toolset: From Data Center to Desktop

Microsoft provides a complete suite of technologies to enable an integrated, end-to-end, virtualized infrastructure. Using products that span the desktop to the data center, you can bring capacities online in real-time, as needed; streamline and provision applications, services and data on-demand; accelerate backup and recovery, and enhance availability so that your users are protected against system failure and service interruptions.

Microsoft has a uniquely comprehensive range of virtualization products and technologies

Today, Microsoft's virtualization toolset for the data center includes Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, which consolidates server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine. On the desktop side, we offer Microsoft Terminal Services, which virtualizes the presentation of entire desktops or specific applications; Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V), which transforms applications into centrally-managed virtual services that are never installed and don't conflict with other applications; Microsoft VDI, which allows customers to centralize the storage, execution, and management of a Windows desktop in the data center; and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V, formerly Kidaro) which, with Virtual PC, enables client-hosted desktop virtualization, where you can deploy and centrally manage VMs on Windows desktops while providing a seamless user experience. To simplify management of your entire infrastructure, we offer Microsoft System Center, which lets you manage both physical and virtual assets for clients and servers, including multiple hypervisors, all with the same platform.

Physical and Virtual Management

Microsoft's unique ability to integrate and centralize management of both physical and virtual resources is critical for two reasons: First, the more you virtualize, the more complex your environment becomes. It's entirely possible that you may not know where your virtual assets reside, how many you really have—think virtual machine sprawl—or how to juggle and optimize them. Secondly, regardless of how extensively you virtualize, you will always have physical components, and using different tools to manage your physical and virtual assets would add even more complexity and overhead.

Microsoft System Center is the glue that brings everything together and unlocks virtualization's real potential. Not only does it pinpoint where virtualization products reside since they are no longer tied to a single location, it lets you easily allocate the right resources to the right people in real-time.

System Center provides you with one system to manage physical and virtual assets across the full application and OS stack, including multiple hypervisors (from Microsoft, as well as from Citrix and VMware). It lets you manage your virtual and physical environments with the same levels of specificity, and uses common deployment, provisioning, monitoring, and backup methodologies across both.

Integrates with Your Existing Portfolio

We make it easier for you to implement enterprise-wide virtualization by delivering technologies that not only are designed to work together efficiently, but that also integrate with your existing Windows infrastructure. Because our virtualization products are based on familiar Windows interfaces and work with well-known Windows-based technologies such as Active Directory, your IT staff can use the skills they already have—minimizing the need for training and speeding your on-ramp.

Just as important, we have a large, active ecosystem of partners who support our virtualization products and can rapidly respond to your business needs.

Lower TCO/Maximum ROI

Microsoft virtualization solutions are proven to save you more money and cost less (often up to one-third less) than competitive products. They help you dramatically lower total cost of ownership and realize the greatest ROI by streamlining many data center and desktop management tasks, allowing you to take advantage of your existing Windows expertise.

With our virtual desktop, data center, and management technologies, you can maximize server utilization and consolidate hardware; automate many time-consuming tasks such as application and OS provisioning, clustering, and load balancing; and efficiently handle patch management and virtual testing.

Delivering on Dynamic IT

Virtualization is key to helping our customers achieve our long-standing vision of Dynamic IT, where people and computers get the resources they need the moment they need them.

As our offerings evolve, we'll be extending the Microsoft Virtualization Technologies Solution to help IT be an even greater strategic asset to your business. Look for us to combine the best of cloud computing with our expertise in business process requirements to deliver logical data centers. These virtual data centers will provide unified management of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), storage, and network virtualization technologies, enable end-to-end management of distributed application services, and will fix themselves as issues arise.

In the end, Microsoft Virtualization Technologies Solution and Dynamic IT are all about helping you provide the resources your people need at a moment's notice, and making your organization much more agile—so you can achieve goals that weren't possible before.