A sharp inclination of organizations towards virtualization is due the potential it carries with its short and long-term advantages which will allow organizations to reduce costs while making their infrastructures more flexible & robust over time.

Virtualization allows organizations to easily encapsulate existing applications and provide freedom to access them in diverse environment. The real benefits of such a process are - overall savings on hardware, environmental costs, management, and administration of the server infrastructure.

All of the leading independent research firms agree that server and other forms of infrastructure virtualization have become a significant component of any successful organizations' competitive IT.

Business Challenge

Internal resources are underutilized under the old “one server, one application” model and IT administrators spend too much time managing servers rather than innovating.

Progressive’s Solution:

• Run multiple operating systems on a single computer including Windows, Linux and more.
• Make different environments compatible to run collaboratively through integration, creating a virtual PC environment.
• Increase ROI by enhancing energy efficiency & requiring less hardware, reducing maintenance activities resulting in lesser administrators/server.
• Ensure highest level of availability & manageability, for all business applications.
• Improve enterprise desktop management & control with faster deployment and fewer support calls due to application conflicts
• Disaster recovery solutions add further robustness in maintaining business continuity and deliver high accessibility throughout the datacenter.

Server Virtualization
Server virtualization is the masking of server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users. The server administrator uses a software application to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments. The virtual environments are sometimes called virtual private servers, but they are also known as partitions, guests, instances, containers or emulations. Server virtualization can be viewed as part of an overall virtualization trend in enterprise IT that includes storage virtualization, network virtualization, and workload management

Application Virtualization
Application virtualization is an umbrella term that describes software technologies that improve portability, manageability and compatibility of applications by encapsulating them from the underlying operating system on which they are executed. Application virtualization separates the application configuration layer from the OS. It enables applications to run on clients – including desktops, servers and laptops – without being installed, and to be administered from a central location. This has huge implications for everything from patch and upgrade management to deploying and terminating applications.

Desktop Virtualization
Desktop virtualization (or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a server-centric computing model that borrows from the traditional thin-client model but is designed to give system administrators and end-users the best of both worlds: the ability to host and centrally manage desktop virtual machines in the data center while giving end users a full PC desktop experience.
Many commercial solutions also add the ability to switch some incoming client sessions (using connection broker software) towards traditional shared desktop systems such as Microsoft's Terminal Services or Citrix's application servers, blade servers or even to individual unused physical desktop computers.

Employing the same approach as server virtualization, desktop virtualization lets you create separate virtual machines on your Windows desktop, each of which virtualizes the hardware of a complete physical computer. You can use Virtual Machines to run operating systems such as MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2. You can also run multiple operating systems at once on a single physical desktop and switch between them as easily as switching applications - instantly, with a mouse click.

Key Benefits:

• Get more out of your existing resources with “Multiple Applications to One Server” model using Server Consolidation
• Reduce datacenter costs by reducing physical infrastructure and improving continuance of application.
• Increase availability of hardware and applications for enhanced business continuity:
• Gain operational flexibility: Respond to market changes with dynamic resource management, faster server provisioning and improved desktop and application deployment.
• Improve desktop manageability and security