In this IBM Redpaper we describe how organizations can use virtualization as a technique to gain more business value and greater flexibility from their information technology (IT) infrastructure.

Businesses and organizations are increasingly becoming virtual, and information technology (IT) is changing to be more flexible and dynamic to support these needs. Additionally, there are opportunities within IT to simplify infrastructure, to provide increased utilization, and to consolidate workloads into fewer, more manageable servers. In the application space, a new paradigm is gathering pace and offers a level of abstraction and virtualization through Web Services and a common messaging hub known as a “service bus”.

In this paper, we examine the positioning of virtualization within the on demand Operating Environment, as well as the infrastructure and server exploitation of virtualization and the function and technology of the recently announced IBM® Virtualization Engine™.