One of the main benefits of server consolidation is a lower total cost of ownership due to lower power, cooling, and footprint costs. With fewer physical servers, you can help reduce your overall energy and footprint costs as well as your impact on the environment. Server consolidation also positively impacts your bottom line through streamlined overhead and simplified management.
Consolidating servers further reduces TCO by allowing you to get more out of the servers you already have. Some servers may only be partially utilized; through virtualization, you can get 100% performance out of every server. Virtualization also lets you optimize server performance for branch offices through improved connection and transfer speeds.
Here are just a few of the consolidation features Microsoft provides:
Quick migration. Quick migration enables movement of running virtual machines from one host to other host servers with minimal downtime.
Network Load Balancing (NLB). Hyper-V includes new virtual switch capabilities. This means virtual machines can be easily configured to run with Windows Network Load Balancing service to balance load across virtual machines on different servers.
High availability. Hyper-V includes support for host-to-host connectivity and enables you to cluster all virtual machines running on a host.
