Why Virtualization is No Longer Optional for Service Provider Engineers

When most engineers hear “virtualization,” we think of the enterprise. Racks and rows of servers running a hypervisor application so that the business can achieve much larger scale, density, and faster speed of “turnup,” ensuring applications and services can run “at the speed of developers.” In fact, we’d be hard-pressed to think of somewhere that isn’t virtualizing their servers in some way. This virtualization does have some additional overhead, though. It adds complexity in the administration, resource and capacity planning, network, and data backup, none of which was initially trivial to the administrators and engineers who had to support it. However, the benefit was the cost savings and density and utilization, as well as the speed at which a new database or web server could…