In this paper, we explored the issues of implementing virtualization in the enterprise. We analyzed IT services and looked at how those services would be impacted in a virtualized environment.

We looked at several use cases being currently investigated by Intel's IT department. The DVM concept provides a new way of looking at deploying services, and it enables a further use case that we are exploring with our OverMesh implementation and the IT Overlay.

We presented a case study of virtualization of a datacenter in which the VMware ESX* Server was used that allowed us to consolidate 20 or even more servers onto a single physical server reducing hardware, electrical, cooling, and administrative costs. Our solution provides robust resource controls for different types of applications, and we can control the levels and limits of CPU, networking, memory, and disk I/O allocated to and used by each virtual system.

Utilizing the virtual environment, IT can quickly create new servers; and virtual servers can be deployed in 30 minutes vs. 60 days to purchase and deploy a physical server. We achieved our goals to minimize our physical footprint in the datacenter, lower our administrative costs, improve our network uptime, and deploy new servers and applications faster. According to Thomas Bittman, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Inc., "integration of virtualization technology with the operating system is a natural evolutionary step for the x86 platform."