Finally, as the IT organization becomes adept at managing critical and tactical workloads across a rationalized server infrastructure, it can use virtualization to dynamically assign resources to improve flexibility and scale - increasing the strategic value to the organization.

With the right tools and policy-based business processes, the IT organization provides an extremely responsive IT infrastructure that supports business demands while efficiently controlling costs.

Desktop infrastructure - Applications: Managing numerous desktop images drives up IT cost and consumes significant IT resources, as does maintaining up-to-date applications and security patches. By separating the application layer from the operating system on the desktop image, an IT organization can remove much of the complexity and management challenges it faces every day.

Application-to-application regression testing is typically required before deploying a major application or OS update. In an environment where applications are virtualized and delivered on demand to the desktop, application-to-application conflicts are nearly eliminated, since the applications execute without impacting the desktop operating system - or other applications.

In addition, application maintenance and security patching is streamlined, since it only needs to take place at the source, not hundreds or thousands of individual desktops.

Desktop infrastructure presentation: In certain circumstances, it is critical that all data reside in a central location rather than becoming distributed across a constellation of desktop PCs. A virtualized presentation configuration places all data storage and processing in a central location, with the desktop being simply a presentation of the user interface.

Storage and network resources: Virtualizing enterprise storage and networks provides another avenue to consolidate resources for greater flexibility and scale. Managing storage and network resources in a virtual environment streamlines resource allocation, provisioning, and maintenance while reducing the apparent system complexity IT managers work with day to day.

Overall infrastructure, business continuity: Converting operating system and application instances into data files streamlines backup, replication and movement, providing a more robust business continuity capability and speeding recovery in the case of an outage or natural disaster.

Management Software: Management software provides enough tools, for example, to convert the physical system into its equaling virtual machine instance. Such tools can be very effective in quick migration into virtualized environment.